


The Boy in the Cage

by HadenXCharm



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Bonding in Times of Hardship, Caves, Confinement, Dark, Gross Graphic Descriptions, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, M/M, Major Character Injury, Near Death Experiences, Period-Typical Homophobia, Rescue, Secrets, Sexual Violence, Starvation, Survival Horror, The Ultimate 'Meet Ugly', aomine can flirt in any situation guys, kagami's got a temper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-07-31 13:15:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 56,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20115694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HadenXCharm/pseuds/HadenXCharm
Summary: Kagami suddenly realizes his fate as he lays eyes on the gaping hole in the ground, stares down into the dark mouth of a cave. There’s another boy down there already, watching from inside an iron cage, squinting up at the light.He fights going into the pit like it’s the furnace of hell.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
  
  
So as per usual when writing for a new fandom, I get through about 2 canon-based fics on average before I get back to my bullshit, which is wacky AUs that have /nothing/ to do with the canon source material. HERE we go again.
> 
> This was inspired by a few different sources. One was this other fanfiction I read years ago about a guy getting put in a cave as a sacrifice to this other guy, who’s supposed to be this monster, but they eventually escape together. I also drew some inspiration from the horror game, _The Forest,_ which is a survival-based sandbox game that has a lot of cave systems in it. <strike>We won’t be seeing any mutant cannibals in this fic, though.</strike> My biggest inspiration was visiting some actual caverns on a recent camping trip I took to Tennessee with [spaztictwitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaztictwitch/pseuds/spaztictwitch) at the end of June. That really gave me the push I needed to fully draft this out.
> 
> For the weak-stomached out there, this is survival horror. It’s amateur, but even so, get ready for a lot of gritty disgusting details that are meant to viscerally revolt you.  


Kagami’s had his hands tied for the last three days.  


His arms have gone completely numb, twisted back too far, his wrists lashed to his elbows. Spit has soaked into the gag tied around his head, a ball of fabric shoved in between his teeth and pushing his tongue back far enough that he can’t swallow without almost choking. His nose is plugged on one side and every time he breathes, snot shoots back to block his airways.

Three days now: that’s how long they’ve been walking, or rather, _ dragging _ him along through the woods, holding him by the upper arms and practically throwing him forward as he fights them at every step.

It takes a lot of stamina to put up a struggle for three straight days, so by day three, Kagami’s worn out enough to finally think past being infuriated and his impulsive attempts to escape by brute force.

He hasn’t helped his situation by being this difficult, honestly. They’ve taken basically everything away that could’ve been of use to him if he’d actually cooperated and schemed up a more subtle escape plan. All his worldly goods had been left behind in his home, no knife, no money, no food, no coat. They’d even taken his shoes after he’d kicked them too many times on the first day, having refused to stop thrashing. Now he almost wishes he had stopped, even if it would’ve meant throwing away his dignity. At least he would’ve had something on his feet to protect them from the rocks and branches they trudge through as they travel the long, winding, and sometimes practically untraversable path through the woods.

Three days. He hasn’t stopped struggling in three days.

His captors seem relieved when his thrashing and enraged screams die down at long last. Kagami hangs his head, glaring at the ground, at his dirty sore feet, and keeps pace as they lead him on.

He looks around them for any landmarks he can try to stake in his mind, up into the treetops at the sky, the leaves glowing yellow and emerald as the sun shines down through them, only a spattering of light making its way through the canopy all the way to the forest floor. The light dappling Kagami’s face makes him squint. Every direction looks the same. Tall thick tree trunks, cedar and beech, towering oaks, a forest floor of dirt and dead leaves, sticks, and fallen logs. He stares around him, but it’s too late in their journey for him to try to remember their path so he can find his way back.

A distant bird cries through the early afternoon, the gentle breeze making the trees above him whisper.

He’s not sure where they’re going exactly. They’ve made quite a bit of distance through the wilds outside the village limits, and when they reach the last outpost, they start climbing.

They walk practically all day, every day. They make camp each night when the sun has set, lay out a mat to sleep on and make a firepit out of stones and branches, and they tie Kagami to the base of a tree while they eat. There are only two men with him, so it’s not impossible to think that he might’ve been able to fight them off at full strength, but his chances went down with each passing day as he grew tired and hungry. 

His next thought is to make an escape at night, disappear and make it as far from them as he can in the darkness, but they’re onto him, and smartly switch off every few hours and keep watch while the other sleeps. Kagami’s tried to pull his hands out of his ropes, squirm and contort himself or grab something with his foot to try and cut the rope with, but if they catch him trying, they rough him up.

He’s always been an incredibly slow and stubborn learner.

Nose blowing blood bubbles every time he breathes, Kagami looks up at the starry sky, head laid back against a tree trunk, and thinks of home. It looks the same as it does from his window.

He’s fought so much that they stay alert and don’t take their eyes off him for a moment, especially after his first couple attempts to break away from them and run blindly into the wilderness. Who knows what his plan was there; maybe outrun them, however impossible that would be with his arms tied, then hide until they give up looking for him— 

They don’t even leave him alone or untie him so he can shit in the woods. Having another guy hold your dick for you so you can pee because your hands are tied is just another humiliation in this already very humiliating situation.

Kagami stands there silently, clamping his teeth tight on the ball of cloth in his mouth, and ignores the breath in his ear, glares at the ground and the puddle of pee mud between his feet, tries to think about something other than where he is and what’s happening— 

“I bet you like that, don’t you.”

Kagami thrashes and screams in rage for the rest of the day. They don’t even hike his pants back up for him.

By day four, the hunger has really set in, and he’s completely exhausted himself struggling. His stomach has caved in and his entire body feels feeble and shaky, black spots clouding his vision when he moves too quickly, the head rush nearly enough to make him pass out. 

They haven’t taken his gag off to feed him, but to make him drink, they dunk his head in a creek until he’s thrashing and floundering. When he comes up, he can’t even cough with the gag in, forced to choke and flail on dry land until he can eject the water from his nose enough to breathe. Kagami tosses furiously, dragged on, a stumbling dripping mess. He glares viciously, eyes leaking as he sucks on the soaked fabric jammed in his mouth, drawing the water out so he can get a drink.

It’s just as well that they won’t take the gag off, because the first thing Kagami would probably do is spit at those fuckers, start cursing them and their families and their kids and their mothers— holler up a storm, scream for help— _ god, help— _

His body’s beginning to fail him. He feels so weak, limbs shaking, vision blurry. He’s never even gone close to this long without eating before, can’t remember if he’s even skipped more than one meal in a row. It probably hadn’t been very smart to fight them this hard up to now. He should have saved his energy, tried to stay alert so he could see where he was being taken in the hopes of being able to find his way back again later when he made his escape. He should have bided his time, but his hatred and rage burnt hot and he’d fought and fought until his body gave out on him and all it can do anymore is barely remain standing and take one wobbling step after another, going where they lead him without protest.

He thinks he knows where they’re going now. He’s seen through bare patches between the tree branches, out into the distant sky. They’re facing the mountain ridges that crest the horizon.

The breeze cools his face. Insects sing in the trees, scattering in front of him. When he looks up, the wings of the dragonflies glinting in the sun look like jewels, zipping above him. He wonders how long they’ve been walking. He doesn’t remember such beautiful sights on the first days. He’d been fighting tooth and nail, not paying attention to a thing but getting free. When he’s too tired to fight anymore, the forest is quiet, sun shining through the trees as always, oblivious to his plight.

He thinks he loved this woods once, when he was a kid. He can see that mountain range from his house. Home seems so far away now.

Day five is spent climbing. And day six. On the seventh night, when they stop and tie him to a tree trunk, they take his gag off. Dried spit and snot has encrusted it to his face so tightly that it feels like they rip his skin off when they pull it away. Kagami coughs and heaves as the wad of cloth is yanked out of his throat, saliva flooding his mouth— 

Before he can open up to yell, one of them jams some mashed-up food in his mouth, and the other plugs his nose so he’ll swallow. He thinks it’s cornbread and deer jerky. He doesn’t spit it out, choking it down with watering eyes. He’ll need the energy for the next part of the hike and they don’t want to have to carry him. He’s already starting to really flag and they’d had to spend most of the day prodding him onward when he stumbled, getting too weak to walk.

They’re still going up then. He wonders if they’ll make it to the top. 

He has a lot of time to think now that he’s too bone tired to do anything but what they tell him. He wonders what they’re going to do to him once they get wherever they’re going. Maybe just leave him. He’s lost anyway, helpless on his own in a sense. 

_ Or are they going to kill him—? _ Cut his throat. Disembowel him so birds will come pick his innards. Smash his hands and feet with rocks so that he can’t walk and can’t catch food when they leave, dooming him to slow starvation. Any number of unspeakable things. There’s no one out here to stop them from doing whatever they want to him when they get there. There’s no one to stop them killing him. Oddly, the idea doesn’t frighten him. It should, but his heart is so numbed by exhaustion that what’s coming doesn’t fully phase him.

By that thread of logic, there’s nothing stopping them from ending him _ now, _ so there was little point in walking him all the way out here first if that had been the plan all along. Especially considering how much he’d infuriated them in the first few days, kicking them in the knee caps, flailing and thrashing, making them practically carry him and wrestle him bodily into the woods. They could’ve killed him then if that was what they’d come here to do. They must not be supposed to kill him, but what _ are _ they supposed to do? Where are they taking him?

Are they going to drop him on the mountainside, lash him to a tree and leave him to die of exposure? Cut his leg and wait for a wolf or a bear to come eat him alive? Roll a rock onto his back and let him suffocate slowly as his ribs collapse? He understood bringing him far away from town, getting put out into some remote location, but it couldn’t be as simple as taking him too far to find his way home and then leaving him be, could it? How will they finish the job.

His sentence _ is _technically just exile, but he figured a certain someone didn’t want him coming back— 

Kagami’s blood burns, dark and hateful, a simmering sense of bitterness that flares hot in an instant. They’d better _ hope _ he never comes back.

Two more days and they’ve made it a good ways up. The forest has become peppered with boulders that must have rolled down from the cliffside. He can see snow on the high peak above them as they trudge ever higher. His feet are aching and tender from bracing them on the bed of needles lacing the trunks of the black pines that dot the hills.

On the tenth day, they’re almost to the top. They’ve left the tree cover, and the direct sunlight is so intense, reflecting off the bleached rocks and the ice cap glimmering in the distance that he has to squint his eyes almost shut. The slope is unforgiving and steep, huge rocks winking out from the sand and gravel and the short stubby grass that’s managed to take root. There’s snow on an adjacent peak, but the air that ruffles Kagami’s hair is still comfortably warm, the sun beating on his burnt shoulders and neck.

They climb and climb until at last they reach a flat area to rest. It’s too steep for him to try to run without risking slipping and breaking himself when he falls and slams into a tree trunk far below, so they let go of his arms for the first time in what felt like forever. 

Kagami turns back and takes a step. He stares out over the skyline, the valley below, face slackening in wonder.

They’ve climbed so high. He can see farther than he thinks he’s ever seen before. From his house, he’d always thought the snowy mountain ridge cupping the eastern skyline was the perfect view, but he hadn’t considered the view looking down. It’s as though he can see the whole world. The forest is a glittering sea of glowing green, beaming in the sun, the individual treetops impossible to pick apart from so far away. The towns are a sprawling mess of tan and red dots, a tiny smudge of roofs and roads. He might even see the ocean beyond that, a sparkling strip of crystal blue along the horizon. 

What amazes him is that he can see the clouds moving, puffy white just above him, blown by the gentle wind. If he sits perfectly still long enough and watches, he can see them changing ever so slightly, taking new shape. When he looks down upon the valley, the large billowing shadows cast by the clouds above creep slowly over the hillside, turning the trees below a dark emerald green. The sun follows behind when they pass over.

The view is breathtaking, and for a moment, just a moment, his heart is still and his raging mind is quiet, held in a trance by its beauty.

He’s so enamored that he doesn’t react when footsteps approach him from the side again, when his arm is taken in a rough grip, when he’s made to tear his eyes away from what he realizes a moment later will be his last look at the world he knows.

What happens next makes his stomach drop.

He’s turned towards the mountain wall, towards the pile of stones lining the flat area they’d stopped to rest at, and sees that they have moved the large stones aside together, underneath which was a very old, very dirty set of what looked to be a crude set of cellar doors, set into the slope on a slant. The iron rings are rusted, and one door is already open and waiting.

One of them is holding him by the arm, but Kagami just stands there and stares, it’s like he can’t react, watching as the other man heaves the second door up, yanking it on hinges that are practically rusted into place. It falls with a heavy slam, revealing a gaping black expanse, the inside of the mountain, so dark that it’s as if they’ve laid a black cloth over the opening, an impenetrable abyss.

And it’s then he realizes his fate as he’s heaved up by his arms and thrown towards the mouth of the cave. He screams, kicks his legs out to brace against the sides of the doorway. He can see in now. There’s another boy in the cavern below, watching from inside an iron cage, squinting up at the light. Kagami’s body, weak and trembling from hunger a moment ago, gets a charge of adrenaline, fear like he’s never experienced giving him strength past what his muscles should be capable of. He fights going through those doors like it’s the furnace of hell.

He hangs onto the doorframe for as long as he can as they try to push him through, stares down into that black pit, a dark hole for him to die in, but they hit and punch him until he finally balls up and then they throw him through the hole like a sack of potatoes.

He hits the ground hard, tumbling and flipping as he bumps his way down a little rocky slope and onto the cold unforgiving stone floor. For a moment, he can only lay there and groan, processing the painful impact. He’d managed not to whack his head, but his sides and arms and hips feel bashed to bits.

Kagami scrambles up as quick as he can, rolling himself onto his front and struggling to get his knees under him. It’s hard with his arms tied back, forcing him to flail and kick awkwardly. Eyes wide, he stares up at the square of light cutting into the abyss. One of the men crawls in after him, slow and careful on his trek down, sliding over the loose stones. The other boy just lays there in his cage, looking bored and hateful.

He manages to push himself up, breathing in and out through his nose to ready himself, hard puffs of air sucked back and forth in quick succession as the man approaches him, footsteps echoing in the dark. Kagami winds up, preparing to be struck, and flinches when a sharp rock is tossed towards him, clattering on the ground in front of him. Then a rough hand is wrangling him by the hair, wrenching his head forward and pulling at the knot nestled there to take off his gag.

Kagami spits and bites the second he does and gets hit in the side of the head with a coiled fist. He’s sent sprawling backwards, legs flailing up as he goes sliding across the gritty cave floor. It takes him several long seconds to right himself, panting, ears ringing, disoriented by the blow. He can see the guy climbing back up through blurry vision, can see their legs as the two of them stand around and heave the doors up.

_ No, _ he thinks helplessly, but can’t find the breath to speak, shout, _ scream _ at them not to close it. The other boy has sat up to watch, but his expression doesn’t change, a blank unphased mask as the doors creak on their hinges. He just stares up into the square of light above them as it shrinks for a moment, and then is suddenly clapped out completely as the doors fall into place with a _ bang— _

Kagami heaves for breath, blood pounding in his ears, encased in utter darkness in an instant, listens as he hears the drag and slam of heavy stones they tow onto the doors from the outside, piling them up and barricading them in. It seems to go on forever.

And then it stops.

Kagami sits there on his ass, head starting to spin with a sense of panic, a flicker of dread in his gut building into an overwhelming tidal wave. He can’t see a thing, not even to tell for sure which way is up. He can’t see and he can’t hear anything over his own raspy breathing. As much as he strains his ears, all that he can make out is a gaping void, the rush and roar of his pulse— 

How is he going to get out of here. He’s going to die here in a pit. Rot underground and waste away till he’s just bones. Just dust. Kagami felt his blood boil in an instant, fury overtaking the absolutely paralyzing sense of helplessness. That fucker meant for him to die here, just because—

Before he knows it, he’s screaming.

He roars and screeches, kicking out and thrashing around on the ground in his rage. His cries echo in the blackness, bouncing back and striking him from all sides, almost too loud to comprehend. He doesn’t know how long he lays there and tosses, straining at his bonds and howling. It rings in his ears, his screams of rage battering the walls and amplifying until they seem almost animal-like— the violent and anguished wail of a beast. 

He flails and rolls until he’s too tired to struggle anymore with his arms tied, scraping and bruising himself up on the hard ground, hollering and throwing himself around in the dark. He pulls himself up and just sits there and screams as loud as he can, body collapsing forward, the cave rattling with his furious shriek.

He stops abruptly. Maybe because it was just too loud to bear anymore. Maybe because he knows this is getting him nowhere. Maybe he’d just screamed himself out.

It takes a long time to die down, echoing back and forth, ringing in the open space. He sits there panting lightly, stomach sore and throat screamed raw. The reverberations are rattling his bones even as they grow quieter, vibrating in his chest. It doesn’t even sound like his own scream anymore. He sits there and listens to the ghostly echo of his howling and wailing, listens till it disappears.

And then absolute silence falls.

At first he sits motionless in the darkness, and the anger having left him, fear starts to take hold. For a long time he doesn’t move an inch, heart pounding, feeling almost as though the incredible weight of the blackness is crushing the air out of his lungs. Being completely unable to see or hear is an incredibly terrifying and vulnerable experience.

As he sits there, breath frozen in his mouth, he eventually manages to calm himself enough to think straight. Don’t— don’t give up just yet. He has to keep his head. He’ll need it to get out of here— he _ is _ gonna’ get out, he can’t accept anything else. Not yet. 

He closes his eyes even though he can’t see fucking shit and forces himself to take full breaths, fill his lungs to the top and then hold it for a moment before letting it out slow. He clenches his bound hands and makes himself sit still and breathe until the panicked drum of blood in his ears starts to subside ever so gradually. Think about anything but where he is, anything but how hopeless this situation surely is, let himself believe that there’s a way out, if he can just think to find it. There’s always a way.

Eventually, sitting there in the silence, he can think past the misery of his situation and can make out the distant drip of water, a soft echo that makes him think of an underground lake, condensation gathering on a stone ceiling and dripping from stalactites hanging like icicles. The air is still and bottomless, and it’s this utter stillness that makes him wonder how deep the cave goes.

Soon he realizes that it isn’t completely black in here either. His eyes eventually adjust and can make out the little shafts of light shining down into the depths through small holes and cracks in the ceiling. He can actually see quite fine, at least in here, well enough to make out that he’s sitting on the floor of a high-ceilinged cavern. Large boulders crop up near where the closed-off mouth of the cave slopes up, but the other walls are smooth, made of grey and brown stone.

It takes some time to shimmy himself over to the sharp rock he’d been left, manage to get it into his hand and then contort himself enough that he can try to pluck at the ropes with the pointy tip of the rock. Pressing himself back against a boulder, he struggles and rubs his bonds on the rough edge. Holding the position is tiring, and the rock slips from his palm a lot, clattering to the ground. He has to stop frequently to get his breath and curses in frustration, a hissed whisper.

At last, arms trembling from the effort, he manages to grind away a strand of the rope. He can feel the frayed edge if he twists his hand. He yanks and pulls, almost working himself up into a frenzy again as he struggles to free his arms. When a rope snaps suddenly, he just sits in surprise for a moment as his shoulders flop forward, laying utterly limp for a horrifying moment.

He excitedly tries to untangle his wrists and bring his hands in front of him, shakes his bonds off and stretches and rotates his arm in the socket, feels at his face, practically slapping himself as his hands move clumsily, heavy and uncoordinated as the blood rushes back into them. He balls his hands into fists, unballs them and rubs at the creased sore skin where the rope had bit in. Free, finally, in some small way— 

He’s free to wander once he stumbles to his feet, arms flailing stupidly to steady himself when he sways. The first thing he does is walk to the cave mouth and try to crawl up to the doors, scrambling over the gravel, rocks clattering down the slope as he uses his feet to shove himself up.

Gritting his teeth, he puts his hands up above him, feels along the seam of the door, tentatively tries to insert his fingers and feel outside. He braces his shoulder against the wood and pushes his weight against it, tries to steady his feet under him, setting loose a hail of pebbles, skittering down beneath him as he slams his back on the doors and tries to shift them. He doesn’t try for long, probably because he’d already known he wasn’t going to be able to get out this way. It’s like pushing against a boulder.

He sits there and pants, feeling dazed this time instead of angry, or even hopeless, and then carefully slides his way back down, the gravel digging into the soles of his feet.

Catching his breath, Kagami looks up above him, squints at the little pinholes of light and then stares around the cavern. He pushes his hair back with his dirty palm and coughs once when he breathes in a lungful of dust. He’s coated in the stuff. He looks up at the ceiling again and then flinches, eyes watering. He digs his hand into the corner of his eye when a piece of dirt pelts him. Must’ve been all the screaming dropping silt from the ceiling.

He pulls his shirt up over his nose and tries to cough as quietly as he can. The way everything echoes is eerie and unsettling, and the unearthly stillness pulls the breath from his lungs, makes a normally noisy and heavy-handed boy sit quietly, curse into his palms in a whisper.

This isn’t the only room. Now that he looks, he can see the gaping blackness towards the back of the cavern where it tapers off and leads on, the ceiling lowering to maybe a little higher than the ceiling in his home. 

_ ‘There’s tunnels—’ _he thinks with a sort of detached numbness as he gets up and shuffles towards the dark hole in the wall, drawn to it like a portal to an endless abyss. He stares into the blackness and feels his heart zipping back and forth, his stomach fluttering.

He can hear running water. At some point he’ll have to go in there and look for it if he wants to survive a little longer in here. He swallows, feeling weak on his feet. 

He’s got no idea what he can possibly find to eat down here, and knows he wasn’t meant to find anything. Exile or not, in being thrown down here, he’s been sentenced to a slow death by starvation.  


… Can he eat… _ rocks?  
_

  
It’s as this tentative and half-delirious thought flits through his mind that he turns, and is almost startled by the sight of the cage.

He’d forgotten it was there for a moment. Forgotten he wasn’t alone.

It’s made of metal of some kind, steel, maybe iron. The bars are thick, the gaps between them large enough to stick his arm through perhaps, but certainly not wide enough for his head. It’s not exactly a tiny enclosure, quite large for a cage, appropriate for a sizable dog, but it’s small for the boy crammed inside it.

Kagami can see that he can sit up straight, but not stand. He can lay down, but not fully stretch out his legs in any direction. He looks chafed about that, shifting every so often on his back, knees up, clearly uncomfortable having to squash his very long and lanky body into such a tight space.

When he sees Kagami watching, he stops, and very casually puts his arms behind his head and props one foot up on his knee. He’d almost look pleased to be lounging there, lazy as a bone, if not for the sour disinterested look he’s shooting Kagami. 

Approaching a ways and stopping short a few yards, Kagami calls out to him. “Hey,” he greets.

He’s definitely another young adult, which maybe shouldn’t make Kagami feel the degree of instant kinship that he does. There’s a feeling of being in the same boat, another kid trapped down here together, facing the same struggles. It’s possible that he’s even the same age as Kagami.

It’s not that Kagami has much of a plan of what to do next or is in a rush to get somewhere. Plus, he feels pretty bad for the guy. He looks so pitiful in there. Who knows how long he’d been down here before Kagami got tossed in, sitting completely alone, hour after hour. 

He’s been in here a while, Kagami can tell that much. He smells even worse up close.

Who knows how trustworthy a complete stranger is, especially one who’d ended up with the same fate as Kagami, if not a worse one. The punishment is meant to fit the crime, after all. He’s got no idea who this person is or what they’ve done and what they’re capable of, and who knows how naive it makes Kagami to assume they can trust each other just because they’re both equally fucked, but even a stubborn ass like him who likes to do everything on his own knows that it’ll be better for both of them if they put their heads together to figure a way to survive and eventually escape—

He doesn’t answer. 

Kagami doesn’t get any closer, but he squats down to his level, peering in at him.

“Hey,” he says a little louder. “You. Who are you?” Folding his arms across his knees, he furrows his brow and squints in at him. His hair and eyes are dark. His clothes are pretty dirty, and his skin is brown.

Mostly what stands out to him is that this kid has really long toes. They’re like monkey toes almost.

“Where are we, do you know?” Kagami tries, confused with being stared at so intently, yet completely ignored. Another long pause. The silence feels almost petulant. “How long have you been here?”

The kid’s eyes are open and he’s staring right at Kagami, but his lips don’t even twitch.

His dark gaze hits him like a strike to the chest. He’s felt it once before. 

On his first hunt at fourteen, Kagami had seen a wolf on the hill. Met its eyes and felt all the hair raise on his neck before it disappeared into the pines. 

This guy’s eyes hit him the same. It’s like looking into the soul of a beast.

“I’m Kagami Taiga.” Kagami was starting to feel uneasy, a little bit miffed at the open scorn in his face. He’s making the first move here, trying to talk to him, and he’s just going to sit there like a lump and goggle at him?

“Maybe you know me?” he wonders. Most everyone did, by the end of that uproar back home. 

“You from Seirin country?” 

Wolf Eyes doesn’t say anything. He just stares at him impassively. Kagami purses his lips and feels his temper flicker. Is he stupid or something? Can he not understand Kagami? Maybe he’s not from Seirin. Maybe he speaks something else. Maybe he might even be deaf; he hadn’t made a peep earlier when Kagami had thrown his very long and very loud tantrum— which, honestly he feels a little embarrassed thinking of now, it having completely slipped his mind that he had an audience.

“What,” Kagami mutters. “Hey, what’s your problem,” he demands.

Monkey-Toe Shit-Breath just keeps staring, and it’s then that Kagami realizes what rubs him so wrong about this guy, because his upper lip lifts ever so slightly at the corner in an ugly sneer, his dark eyes piercing into Kagami’s, hooded and lazy. 

He’s not staring. He’s leering his ass off. 

“You got somethin’a’ say?” Kagami demands, voice starting to color with heat, echoing sharply and rattling in his ears.

Jerkface holds eye contact with him for a long time, but he says nothing, and after another dirty look, he shifts suddenly, turning over to look out the other side of the cage, cushioning his head on his folded arm. His monkey toes pick idly at the bars.

Kagami sits there and stares for a moment, shocked into silence at the rude dismissal. His blood burns hot in an instant, and he gets to his feet. “Fine then,” he snaps, overcome with a tremendous urge to kick the guy’s cage as hard as he can.

He’d do it too, but they took his shoes away on day one. It feels so long ago now.

_ ‘Starve alone,’ _ Kagami thinks furiously, head full of steam. _ ‘See if I care.’ _

Huffing like an angry bull, he storms off blindly a few steps down the black tunnel, needing to throw his hands out in front of him almost immediately when visibility drops from dim to pitch blackness. 

His pride won’t let him turn back even though his knees are going to start knocking together at any moment. For a second he stands there in the dark, listening to the far-off sounds of running water, and then puts one hand out in front of him, a little ways from his face, and runs the other along the cave wall, skirting it closely. 

There won’t be any wood down here. It’s not as if trees could grow underground with no sun, but this would leave him with no wood for a fire, not that he knew how to make one anyway, but a torch would’ve been nice. Not to mention how much he’d like to warm his chilled fingertips and toes.

He explores as far as he dares without a torch of any kind. Kagami figures that it was about midday when he was thrown in, so he guesses that there’s a few hours of light left before nightfall would turn the cave utterly black. As things stand, he can’t see his hand in front of him, no matter how close he brings it to his nose. There’s no difference whether his eyes are closed or not. He breathes through his mouth, wet and raspy, heavy panting coming quick and forced as he shuffles his feet forward, sliding them in front of him one at a time to feel for obstacles. 

In the blackness, his imagination conjures up huge hulking beasts, cave hermits, sinkholes, and skeletons. At any moment he’s sure his hand is going to touch something repulsive, or that he will find himself trapped somehow, unable to find his way back to the first cavern. If he could light a torch, then maybe venturing this far wouldn’t feel so scary.

His hand scrabbles for the wall and meets nothing suddenly, and a powerful wave of raw fright hits him like a club. He plants his feet and flails for an anchor point, slaps his palm to a jutting ridge of rock, cool and damp against his clammy flesh. A shuddery breath passes his lips.

His eyes are open wide, straining for even a pinprick of light, the _ reflection _ of a pinprick, anything he can make out, but it’s nothing but black static. He can’t even see himself. He should probably turn back before he gets lost. He can come back with a torch.

Kagami stays there and rests until he can calm his rocketing heart. Takes another few steps, feels around to try to figure the reason he’d lost the wall so suddenly, and finds that the tunnel took a sharp bend, maybe a fork of some kind.

He walks slowly and cautiously, hand flush to the wall, gathering condensation on his fingertips as he drags it along. His steps are starting to echo ever so slightly, slapping against the damp stone, and every so often he stops to listen to the distant _ drip— drip— _

He follows the right wall with his hand and doesn’t leave it, inching through the dark with only his own breathing as company. It’s awful, the pit of utter dread in his gut. He’s shaking all over. It might be the scariest thing he’s ever done.

He’ll go back, he tells himself when he feels he can’t go forward, when he starts to tremble and practically wheeze through a chest and gut knotted up too tight to breathe. He’ll go back soon. Just a little farther.

“Ah!” Kagami yelps, the cry echoing down the corridor in front of him, ricocheting into the distance until it almost sounds like someone is calling out to him. He slaps a hand to the top of his head. Something cold had struck him. His hand comes away wet. A drop from the cave ceiling.

“Fucking shit,” he breathes. The dark is getting to him. It’d be so easy to go mad down here. 

He’ll just have to get out before that happens.

There’s no reason not to keep going except for fear and time. He’d planned to get back to the main cavern before nightfall, but he’s not sure how long he’s been down here anymore, and it’s not as though he can get lost if he sticks to the same wall and then goes back in the same way. So Kagami keeps going, shaky step after shaky step, walking blind.

Actually…

Kagami stops, squinting. He can hear the running water again, a beautiful hollow echo. He thinks he’s going towards it. And what’s more is that he can actually see. No colors, no features or anything, nothing useful, but when he holds out his arm and waves it, he can tell something’s moving in front of him— a subtle shift from utter darkness to a slightly less impenetrable black, able to differentiate the variating shades.

_ ‘Is that…? Hang on, where’s that light coming from?’ _

He makes his way forward with renewed energy and a little spark of hope. Maybe there’s another cave pocket up ahead where light peeks through. He might’ve even come upon another exit. 

As Kagami walks, the staticky blackness starts to gradually lift, revealing the shadowy outline of the tunnel walls, the grey stone of the path under his feet, hollows in the wall and the ceiling, dark holes that seem to Kagami like the great eyes of some massive skull. 

Just as he’s excitedly thinking that he’s able to make out his feet beneath him, Kagami rounds a bend and lets his hand fall away from the wall as the tunnel opens up. He’s found another part of the cave with a lot of sunlight, and it’s easy to see why. 

He stands there and squints, feeling like a bat that’s come out in the day, shielding his eyes as he tries to get a look at the ceiling to the cavern. There’s a large opening far, far above him.

The walls of this part of the cave aren’t sloped, they curve, arcing up towards the hole like a dome, so there’s no way for him to climb up there. He vaguely wonders if he could use his rope bonds to create a grappling hook with a stone or something and try to throw it out the hole and see if he can anchor it on something and pull himself out. Maybe he can pick up and carry stones to this room and stack them in a pile, see if he can make the pile tall enough to get to the top. He wonders how long that would take, if he could last that long without starving first. 

For now though, he stands there in the light, staring up at the hole, a round awkward shape, and enjoys the light, even though his eyes hurt like he’s staring directly into the sun. He can see the sky. A cloud passes overhead, and he can tell the wind is blowing, because he can make out a bit of grass swaying. He doesn’t know how far he’d made it, walking underground, because he doesn’t remember seeing long grass on his climb up the mountainside.

When he at last tears his eyes from the beautiful, beautiful sight, a glimpse of the outside world, he surveys the cavern he’s found. Small to medium sized boulders of grey rock like the cave floor ring the walls. It looks like the rubble left behind from an avalanche or a rockslide, shattered pieces of stone. The pieces towards the edges look sharp and rough, but the stones closer to the center of the cavern, beneath the hole, these are worn smooth, and now that Kagami’s looking, he can see that moss has grown on the rocks beneath, clinging there in the patch of sun, a soft warm carpet, the ideal place to rest his weary head.

What he realizes next is that he’s come to part of the underground river. Well, he says river, but as he walks over to inspect it, the water doesn’t even come to his ankles, little more than a sheen of water cutting through the ground, just enough to trickle steadily over the rockface and seep off into the blackness down another tunnel.

He stumbles to it and scrambles to put his hands in it, tries to gather some into his cupped palms and lift it to his face. It seems clear, and he’s thirsty enough to risk how sick it will make him if it’s not. He slurps the moisture out of his palms, and when that’s not enough, he sticks his face down onto the ground. He’s so thirsty that he sucks at the ground like a dog from a puddle, tongue out to slurp up the flow of water off the bare rock, chokes and coughs as his nose goes just under the shallow surface.

When he's knelt there until his knees ache and his belly is sloshing with water, he splashes some of it up onto his dirty arms because he might as well. His face too, and his neck and chest. He splashes handfuls onto his face to cool his head, flinging his sopping hair around, gasping and snorting when droplets of water run and drip from his bangs to his nostrils.  
  
When he ceases drinking and bathing, the sky above has gone purple and gold. He drags his aching bones beneath the patch of dusk and rests there on the patch of moss. This will be the perfect cavern for him to live in while he’s here— and if he can’t escape, it’s the perfect place to stay as he dies. 

Kagami stares up above him, throat tightening, and thinks of home. 

And for a second, he feels utter despair as the thought strikes him that he will never, never get back home. He’ll die here and leave a pile of starving bones. Absolute hopelessness crashes through him like a wave on the beach, but it recedes in time. 

He takes a deep breath to ease the ache and shifts on the rocks, the thin layer of moss only serving as the most meager comfort. He finds he’s so exhausted after so many days spent fighting every second, staying up all hours of the night in the woods to try and wait for the perfect time to escape, he’s so bone-tired that the cold hard floor isn’t enough to keep his eyes from drooping. He’s too tired even to think of tomorrow’s tasks, what his ultimate fate will be if he fails to forage enough to get by.

He does pull his knees up as much as he can and wraps his arms inside the hollow he creates there, keeping them close to his middle. As night falls, his prison of stone feels cold. The sun has gone down completely and the burnt sky has lost its glow, but it isn’t as dark as he thought it would be. He can still see fairly well, laying in a ring of silver moonlight within a dark shell.

As he lays there and listens to the distant dripping, Kagami stares above him for as long as his eyes will stay open.   
  


He can see the stars, little cold pinpricks shining down through the purple night. As utterly indifferent to his fate as he would be to that of a speck of dust.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aomine, you're just salty. 
> 
> Here's a little more to get the story going. <strike> cause it's no fun till they interact</strike>

When Kagami wakes again, it seems to be morning. If not for the gaping hole in the rock hanging above him and the light that pours through it, he might not have known— but the light isn’t what rouses him.

Water is trickling over his face, and when it finally gets in his nose and mouth and makes him cough, he sits up and gasps, wiping his face and head. He shudders all over and finds himself soaked, water hitting him in a steady drizzle, scattering in a hail of drops as it strikes his head. He sits there disoriented for a moment, floundering and chilled to the bones. When he moves out of range, the water slaps the ground and splatters loudly, a heavy drumming noise.

When he at last wipes his wet bangs from his eyes and smooths the droplets from his face, he squints above him, using a hand to shield his eyes. The sky seems white with cloud-cover. It’s raining on the mountain and the run-off is spilling into the hole. Not quickly enough to alarm him, but it does cause a flicker of dread to creep through. 

If it storms badly enough, is it possible that parts of the cave could flood? These caves have smooth floors and walls, so that means they were carved out by water in the first place, doesn’t it? 

As horrible as slowly starving sounds, death by drowning terrifies Kagami, perhaps even more than starvation. 

_ ‘What if they flood?’ _ he wonders, standing there and watching the water pour from the edges of the hole and slap to the stone ground, flowing and joining the little creek running on the side of the cavern. He can already see the creek has turned into a steadier rush of water, a few inches deeper and zipping past his feet.

Well. If the cave floods then Kagami will just have to wait it out. Maybe the water will even rise high enough that he can float up and crawl out of that hole up there. As nice an idea as it sounds, he knows it would be scary. The flood current might rip him under, down into the blackness of the tunnels, long before the point where he’d be able to swim out the top. And besides that, if they did flood, that other boy would be totally fucked long before then.

Now that he’s awake, there’s no point staying here any longer. He’d found some semblance of what could be considered shelter, or at least a base camp, and next was to find food, and if not food, then something he could eat without purging from both ends. 

Shivering and pitiful as a wet cat, Kagami hugs and rubs his arms and stumbles along next to the shallow bed of water, tentatively following it downstream. It cuts into a wide tunnel, and even though the water level has risen slightly, there are still a few feet of dry stone path to each side of the flow. Kagami would prefer to keep things simple and always follow the right wall when he explores the unknown of the underground, but the water seems to favor the right side of the tunnel, and Kagami is frigid enough that he’d prefer not to walk in the icy water. He’ll just have to remember he took the left wall in this particular tunnel.

It only takes about ten steps down for it to start getting really, really dark again. Not as dark as last time, since the light pouring through the mouth of the cavern behind him shines almost directly into this tunnel, which seems like a fairly unwavering path. The echoing of his footsteps seems to shoot off in front of him, straight down from what he can tell. 

His eyes need time to adjust again as he shuffles on, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him. He can make out the great shadow his body casts in front of him, the light at his back. 

Then it’s just him and the rush and bubble of the creek. He goes slow, because even though the tunnel seems to generally remain wide and easily traveled, Kagami’s wary of whacking his head on a low ceiling in the darkness. It’s not as scary as he remembers it last night. Maybe it’s the sense that he knows he’s being led somewhere. Maybe he’s hungry enough that his fear is put to one side. Whatever it is, he quakes and follows the water’s flow for quite a ways, what he thinks is about five hundred steps.

He can hear something in the distance, echoing and rocketing back and forth in the tunnel, a low buzzing staticky noise, a swift rushing and smattering splash that goes on ringing forever.

He’s been walking for the last four hundred steps in complete blackness, his only comfort the reminder that _ he’ll turn back, he’ll turn back in just a moment. _He just needs to see where this leads and then he’ll go back. He can make it just a little further before then, surely— 

The buzzing gets louder until Kagami finds the source. The water at his side rounds a bend and he follows its curving path, his hand trailing down the wall as he gazes in wonderment. The noise suddenly hits him directly, immediately recognizable as it echoes richly in the natural acoustics of the cave.

He seems to have come into another air pocket in the cave, because the tunnel widens and falls away. The river bed widens as well, racing away in front of him. It’s almost completely dark in this cavern. He doesn’t know where the light is coming from, but he _ can _ see, just barely, because of little reflections on the surface of the water.

He’s found the main river, cutting horizontally through the room. It flows in through a tunnel on the right. It’s much deeper, and is disturbed by the ringing crash of a waterfall rushing down from the center back wall to meet it, white and foamy. The small stream he’s been following joins the main river, which lets into a pool underneath the falls. 

It must be much deeper right there, because the waterfall is raging into it. The pool is a wide point in the river’s flow, and it sprawls towards him, a large shallow area that is relatively calm, small ripples gently lapping at the shores. The pool trickles off through another outlet on the left, flowing away and seeping down another tunnel, the ceiling of which Kagami can see quickly dives to meet the surface, leaving the water to seep under the rock wall.

Kagami can come here to bathe and swim, maybe. The cavern with the sky portal will be his camp, or base, not that there’s anything to set up there, any shelter or materials to _ make _a shelter other than stones. He'll stay there at night, but in the day, he figures he ought to keep exploring. Maybe he can find something he can eat. He has to find something soon, anything that he can digest.

Rocks, dirt… Maybe he can eat that moss, or if there are insects— Are there any animals down here at all? Maybe birds occasionally fly in through that hole in the ground. He hasn't seen any bats yet, but maybe somewhere...

Shivering all over and hugging his arms to his chest to trap some heat close to his core, Kagami approaches the water. His hair and skin has dried on his walk, but his clothes are still chilly and damp. He’ll have to lay them out in the sun later.

In the shallows of the pool, he can see a crayfish scuttling. Little blind fish are wiggling around, fat and slow. His mouth immediately floods with saliva, stomach yowling and collapsing, clenching on nothing. He puts his hand in the frigid black water and half-heartedly swipes for one, and it zips away. 

He’s not going to have any luck catching them, but he can practice later. That’s what he tells himself and the bottomless hunger that is already clawing within him to be sated.

Kagami groans softly and eases himself down onto his bottom, the water lapping at his toes. He may as well try to bathe while he's here. His body odor is getting pretty bad and he's got some painful acne on his back and butt, built-up from days of sweating in the hot sun, climbing the mountain. How he wishes he were back there now instead of here. He holds his stomach and lets his forehead touch his knees. When was the last time that he ate?

Before he was taken. And then once before they started to climb the mountainside, but even that must’ve been a few days ago now. He’s feeling dizzy with it, weak and shaky all over. It’s past mere hunger. It’s all-consuming, on his mind every second. It’s hard to think about _ anything _but the pain in his gut. 

He drinks from the pool to try to fill his belly, but it only helps for a little while and just makes him need to pee a lot.

There’s no reason to speak aloud when he’s alone, so by the time he finishes staring longingly at the fish bumbling around in the clear shallows, finishes trying to wash himself in the icy water, scrub the smell from his pits and the grease from his face, he heads back to the room with the mossy rocks and finds himself with the inane urge to hum or whisper in the silence, talk to himself, even if only to remind himself he has a voice, and a face, and a name.

Kagami strips his chilly clothes and lays them to dry on a rock in the fading circle of daylight, then spreads his shivering naked body out next to them to dry all the damp patches of flesh that remained. 

He lays there and looks up at the sky, hands on his middle, and he tries to whistle a song, a short whispery sound that echoes back to meet him. Maybe he should try to sleep a little. There’s not much else to do. It’s weird to be so utterly alone all day. He’s not used to it.

Kagami swallows uneasily.

  
_ He’s not alone though—_

Kagami opens his eyes and shifts. That boy will need some water. It’s not like he’s able to forage for himself, locked up in there. He’s been here even longer than Kagami has, who knows how much longer he can last, and whether he gave the impression of a rude jerk or not, Kagami felt unsettled and guilty thinking of him wasting away in there.

Kagami should find a way to bring him some water to drink tomorrow. The problem is that he doesn’t have any idea how. He doesn’t see how he can carry it to him. He can’t just carry it in his hands. The underground pool is a considerable distance from the first cave where the boy’s cage is. All but a few drops will surely leak away by the time Kagami gets it to him. He doesn’t have any other sort of container to act as a jug, not even a shoe. Maybe a rock with a hole or a hollow, if he can find one.

Even if their ultimate fate is to starve, Kagami feels it’s his responsibility to at least try to help them both survive as long as they can, survive just a little bit longer.

He’d been irritated with him before, but too long alone was making Kagami feel like he was going to lose his mind. At least there was another living person down here to hold onto, nice or not, and a jerk in a cage is better than no jerk at all. He’ll give talking to him another shot.  
  
  
When Kagami goes to sleep, the moon passes overhead once, visible through the hole, casting him in a ring of silver light.

Kagami wakes when the sun shines on his face. Day three already. Maybe he should be keeping track, scratch a line on the wall like prisoners do, before they all start to blur together.

When Kagami picks himself up and treks his way back to the entrance of the cave, creeping through the darkness, his stomach is tying itself in knots. Every minute that passes, the sense of dread builds. The passage is longer than he remembers, even though he knows he must be walking through faster than he had the first day.

As the blackness starts to lift, Kagami slows, hesitantly approaching the mouth of the tunnel, fist pressed on his gut, apprehensive about what he would find. The cave is completely quiet, and for a moment he just stands and peers in.

The boy is laying there on the ground in silence, motionless. Kagami swallows thickly. 

_ ‘Is he… alive?’ _

Kagami takes a few steps out, standing on his toes and leaning up to try and peek in at him. He nears a little more, heart pounding hard, and finds that he still can’t tell if he’s asleep or has passed out, or— 

He covers his mouth and nose and steps closer, but doesn’t approach any further after a point. The smell is too bad. The kid has pissed himself and is laying in a pool of it, leaking out of the cage and soaking the legs of his pants. He has his hand outside the bars, pitifully reaching. His head is turned down onto the metal floor, nose squashed into the ground, like it had collapsed there. The sight makes Kagami’s gut twist.

“Hey,” he tries, but the guy doesn’t move. Doesn’t even twitch. He’s breathing shallowly but that’s it.

Kagami felt sick, his heart fluttering and flipping. Is he… _ dying?_

He leaves him, leaves that horrible sight and charges back down the tunnel. He needs to find food. It’s more urgent than ever that he find something, _ something— _Maybe he can feed him, give him the energy to revive. Kagami tries to still his frantic pulse, slow his breathing, and not barrel through the cave in a panic, but he can do nothing to keep his forced breath from puffing between his lips, loud and raspy.

He doesn’t know how long it takes him to make it all the way from the first cavern to the flowing river and the waterfall, maybe half an hour, maybe a little less if he hurries at a steady pace. At any rate, when he finds his way back to the black pool, he approaches the edge and can see the cave fish in the shallows.

He swallows hard as he watches them swim. They seem at home in the dark, little animals that can survive in the pitch blackness, positively thriving without predators to cap their numbers. He’ll have to give catching them another try, because he doesn't know how much longer he can go before his situation will grow too desperate for him to delay any longer, and his body too weak to aid him.

It’s cold again today, the stone insulating the cool damp breath of the earth. There’s no wood for a fire. Kagami wishes there were. 

Staring down at the water’s surface with a wild gleam in his eye, Kagami stands in the shallows, flesh prickling in the chilly current. He stands there on the banks of the pool, feet in the water, stands there perfectly still for ages until his knees are shaking and his back is stiff, waiting for a fish to come nibble on his toes.

He tries to grab for them, but they dart away before he can even touch them. 

A knot wells up in his throat, sudden and sharp, and as utter hopelessness overwhelms him, he loses his temper and screams. It rattles and blends in with the crashing of the waterfall as he howls and hits the water with his fists, thrashes until he’s soaked. He’s so hungry, why can’t he just— _ he doesn’t want to die— _

Soaked and exhausted, bitterly upset, Kagami heaves himself out, tugging his butt out of the mud, breaking the suction with a wet _ smack, _ and wades to shore. He wrings his shirt out, getting out dripping.

No luck there unless he can find an easier way to catch something, and control his frustration when he fails. Perhaps if his situation wasn’t so desperate, a setback wouldn’t seem such a devastating event, but as it is, he’s really touchy.

That was the only idea he had on what to eat, and with that as an impossibility as it stands now, Kagami has to keep looking.

Wandering, stumbling along and trailing puddles in his wake, his sopping pants drizzling down his ankles and his slippery feet, Kagami holds his growling stomach and tries one of the other tunnels leading off from the sky-portal cave. There’s several, and they wind and wander, scarily narrow.

His ears and nose are aching. He breathes into his wet palms and cups them over his ears. He’s sure they’d be pink if there was light enough to see them with. His fingertips too. 

His foot comes down on something unfamiliar, not the cave floor and not a stone, alarmingly soft, enough so that it had snapped under his heel and smeared underneath it, ground into mush.

Did he just step on an insect? Damn, it had been so _ big— _

Swallowing thickly, Kagami squats in place and feels around tentatively. It takes a few moments for him to make out and squint in the darkness, at last realizing he’s found a patch of mushrooms growing on the floor. They’re on the wall too, sprouting out of a patch of lichen. Maybe the moisture of the nearby river had left enough condensation on the stone, he doesn’t know exactly how they’re here, but he doesn’t care. The sight of them is such a joy, short small mushrooms, brown with wide flared caps.

He stares, stomach gnawing in pain, mouth watering. He’s so hungry that he thinks he might start dry heaving. His throat is knotting up and his hands are shaking, because he knows what he’s about to do. He can’t— _ he can’t help himself— _

He knows this is a really bad idea. He’s going to end up poisoning himself. He’s going to get sick and vomit if he eats these, he knows it’s a very real possibility, eating unidentified cave mushrooms, but he’s so hungry that he’s feeling desperate enough to try anyways. He’s never been so hungry in his entire life, not even close. It’s beyond hunger by now, far beyond it— it’s this aching desire to consume, consume and survive, through any means— 

His trembling hands scrabble at the rock, dig them up from the stalks, and he shoves them in his mouth, one messy handful of broken crushed stems and caps after another, dirt and sand and all. He crams them in, choking and sniffling, swallowing them practically whole, grabbing for them and snapping them up almost in a frenzy— 

He slows and is able to chew his food after a few delirious seconds, sits there and eats until he comes out of the fog and tells himself he should take it easy, try to ration some for later. He sniffs and wipes his nose with his wrist, picks the grit from his teeth and holds his belly. His stomach feels sick and full, but after ten minutes, he’s still kept it down, and though his gut is sore, he doesn’t vomit.

He gathers what’s left of the mushroom patch in his shirt and carries the bundle back with him to his camp. He was meant to save them for tomorrow, but in the end, he can’t resist eating the rest before he falls asleep that night.

The mushrooms must be edible, because Kagami doesn’t wake up high off his ass, and he doesn’t puke and shit his guts out, at least not yet. Thankfully, the hunger has subsided somewhat, returning to the usual hunger he knows, annoying rather than this clawing emptiness, a gaping void that cried to be satisfied.

He felt comforted with the knowledge that he isn’t doomed to starve just yet because of his failings as a fisherman. He has somewhere else he can go back to, he can go back and eat and keep death at bay for just a little longer. 

If he manages to find more, he might even be able to feed himself enough to keep his strength up and try to search the cave for another exit. At the moment, finding food had seemed a more urgent matter than getting out.

Kagami sighs aloud, his voice echoing just a little, and in the ensuing stillness, he’s struck with another void, another hunger— an aching sense of loneliness.

He thinks of the boy again. He’s tried not to, because every time he does, he feels this pang of dread strike his heart. Deciding he’s stalled enough and should check up on him again, Kagami stands and walks down the cave tunnel, hand trailing the left side as he slowly creeps back in the silence. His gut is in knots, because he knows what he’s going to find. If only he’d brought him some food last night, shared what he’d found. If only he could figure out how to bring him some water, maybe he could have held on a little longer— 

He hadn’t looked good yesterday. It must be almost over by now.

When Kagami comes to the mouth of the cavern, he covers his mouth and stands there frozen, ready to be met with the ghastly sight of death, something he’s been largely shielded from in the life he’s known till now. His father hadn’t even let him see Mother when they’d lost her. This boy, sprawled out underground, his lifeless body wasting away, it’s a memory Kagami doesn’t want to carry with him.

He plugs his nose to block out the smell of death, rotting flesh, ready at any moment to hurl himself away from the sight, but the overwhelming dread and the powerful curiosity it wielded drew his eyes like a magnet. What would he find— the body of the boy, unmoved and reaching through the bars, face caved in on the ground, same as yesterday…

Kagami approaches a few steps when he peers out, because it only takes a glance to see that his worries have not come true. 

The boy has moved since he’s last seen him. He hasn’t died. It’s actually a real relief to Kagami to see that he seems to be okay. He’d been really scared.

When he sees that he’s awake, he walks out towards the cage, approaching the boy, but quickly falters, wrinkling his nose. He smells like shit. No, like— actual shit. He’s thrown it out of the cage, as far as he can get it away from himself.

He’s sitting up, alert, and when he sees Kagami coming, he faces him, shifting closer to the wall of the cage Kagami’s walking towards. He puts his face close to the bars, looking through at him.

Kagami opens his mouth to speak, and all that comes out for a second is a cracked whisper, his voice failing him. He coughs and tries again.

“Hey,” he greets. Like before, the boy doesn’t answer, just stares with this attitude that Kagami doesn’t feel he deserves.

“Hey, do you need help?” 

He actually does answer that, and Kagami’s surprised. He’d be pleased too, if his voice wasn’t as scornful and bitter as his face and the looks he keeps shooting. Kagami immediately wishes he’d shut back up again.

“Help with _ what?” _ he spits, looking at Kagami like he’s some sort of freak. Like _ he’s _ the spectacle, even though he’s the one in the cage.

Kagami scowls deeply. “I dunno’,” he blurts, feeling a little foolish and a lot defensive, which he doesn’t think is fair. He’d thought the guy was dying last time he saw him!

“Aren’t you hungry?” he accuses, forgetting his intentions to try a fresh start with the guy. He matches the kid’s rude and confrontational behavior immediately with an attitude of his own, as his temper has always been wont to do. 

“Yeah, stick your hand in and gimme’ a bite,” the guy snaps. Then he seems to consider, looking up into Kagami’s incensed face, and though he doesn’t smile, he seems to be getting some spiteful satisfaction out of ticking him off.

He switches off the openly bitter mood he’d met Kagami with on a dime, his hackles lowering. He looks almost lazy again, like he can’t be bothered with Kagami’s hotheaded blustering. That bored look just pisses him off more.

“Actually get your whole arm in here.” 

His voice reverberates in the cave in a different way than Kagami’s does, much deeper, a low hum that buzzes in Kagami’s ribs when it echoes. It’s a voice so lazy and bored that it seems to fit the impression Kagami had gotten of him on the first day, laying there like a cat in the sun, too aloof to care about his circumstances. 

He has this incredibly arrogant air about him even in a situation so helpless, it almost gives the impression that he _ chose _ to be in here or something— 

He’s sitting back on his hands, looking up at Kagami from lowered lids, lips arranged in a half-hearted sneer. Kagami huffs out his nose, glaring back, and makes another valiant effort to give the guy some slack.

Look, they’re both pissed from being hungry and trapped. Kagami’s got a dehydration headache and a bellyache, and this guy’s in even worse shape than he is. It makes sense that he’d be a little testy and not super psyched to be his new best bud, but he’s jumping on Kagami’s nerves. His temper has always been notoriously short, but he really can’t handle the slights at a time like this. Especially when he’s made such an effort to try to help and be nice to him, the least he could do is be a little thankful.

“Why don’t you fix your attitude,” Kagami growls out, simmering with irritation. 

Cage Kid doesn’t appreciate it, because he just raises an eyebrow and returns smoothly, “Why don’t you fuck off.”

_ That does it— _

“Fuck off, huh?!” he shouts, a vein popping in his forehead. He kicks at the cage as hard as he dares, shoving at it with the bottom of his foot. It doesn’t even budge. 

“Pf.” The kid tsks the barest laugh, not even smiling, just watching him. The smug look on his face, like he’s gloating, _ you can’t get me in here— _It’s driving Kagami bonkers. 

He kicks at the bars again and when that doesn’t satisfy him, he grits his teeth with a growl, looking around for a rock he can throw at him. 

“I’m trying to fucking help you, you piece of shit!” he rages. “I thought you were gonna’ croak!”

“I’m a deep sleeper.”

“Like fuck you were asleep! You passed out and fucking peed yourself!”

“I’m a bedwetter.”

“The hell you are!” Kagami’s got no idea why he’s lying when they both know Kagami _ saw _him. He’s not even lying like he’s really even trying to fool him and it’s maddening. He’s just slinging bullshit to be impossible on purpose.

“Are you fucking deaf? I said fuck off.”

“Don’t be a dick to someone who’s trying to help you!” Bedwetter rolls his eyes back. Kagami bares his teeth.

Kagami was just trying to look out for him and _ help _ him when he can’t help himself. He didn’t have to come back here to check on his sorry ass, and he’s gonna’ act like this? What an asshole this guy is! Man, it’s infuriating!

“Who asked for your stupid help.” Giving such mellow responses in the face of Kagami’s fury takes a special brand of dickhead. He probably knows what he’s doing too, because he doesn’t do more than raise a brow when Kagami picks up a rock and pulls back to throw it. 

He picks in his ear, closing his eyes when Kagami’s yelling keeps echoing. Like _ Kagami’s _ being the troublesome one—

“I’m gonna’ die in here anyway, so at least gimme’ some peace and quiet,” he hums, and Kagami lowers his arm slightly.

Earwax Picker opens an eye and gives Kagami a dark glance. “You’re lucky you didn’t bring the cave down with your fucking bullshit before. Goddamn howler monkey.” 

Kagami sheepishly thinks of his screaming fit and grinds his teeth together. He can’t help but glance up, confirming that there weren’t any stalactites hanging in this cavern to dislodge in the first place.

The kid snorts. Kagami’s brow furrows, a muscle pinching in his jaw. “Figures. I thought you looked like a screamer.”

Kagami does throw the rock.

_ Oh, this—!   
_

Perhaps it’s the situation that brought him to these dire circumstances in the first place, maybe he’s just got a chip on his shoulder from the scorn he’s endured till now, but this little shit really hit a nerve with that kind of talk. He’s seeing red, he’s so mad. What a lech, and he’s so fucking smug about it too. _ This absolute— piece— of _ ** _shit!_ **

The stone hits the bars and breaks with a tremendous crash. He’s absolutely enraged, face bright red and steaming. The most infuriating part is the kid looks pleased with himself, leering worse than before, giving him this gross look. Kagami wants to wring his fucking neck! If he wasn’t in that cage where Kagami can’t get to him, he’d teach him a fucking lesson about who he can talk to like that—

“Yeah that’s it.” He’s smirking a little, like talking like a no-good low-down mutt to get him piping mad was funny.

Kagami picks up another stone the size of his fist and hurls it. It clangs against the bars and bounces off, hitting the ground and rolling.

“Shitty aim. C’mon, quit potshottin’ it and throw it like you mean it.” He looks through the bars at Kagami, eyes hooded, this look of spiteful satisfaction all over his face, bitter and pinched. “Right here,” he directs.

He sails a hand towards his own head and hits the side of it with his knuckles, then clicks his tongue, mimicking the sound of a rock striking him and knocking him dead.

“Do me in already, will ya’,” he drones, bored and listless. “They should’ve just hung us. Or burnt us at the stake. At least it woulda’ been quicker than this bullshit.” He snorts. “Starving in a cave on a mountain. Sons a' bitches— I hate it when they drag it out.” Kagami stops and blinks, glare loosening minutely.

Sighing and trying to stretch and crick his back in the confined space, he mutters wistfully, “I wanna’ get this whole dying thing over with already.”

Kagami heaves and pants, letting his arm hang at his side, stone in hand. He stares at him, this odd uncomfortable feeling twisting within him. Confusion. He can’t read this guy. Why is he talking like that?

The kid looks back at him, dark-eyed and impassive. “What— No?” Kagami’s shoulders puff up and down as he pants, straightening up. 

“C’mon,” he prods. “I’m not so keen on starving to death.”

“You’re not gonna’ die,” Kagami grunts, tossing the rock aside. He gives him a dark look, his best attempt at a stinkeye, although he doesn’t think it does much to intimidate him. “... Unless you get on my bad side.”

“Which one’s your bad side?”

Kagami pauses for a beat. It takes him a second, then his temper flickers. Was that another jab? He can see the kid’s teeth, glinting in a cheeky smirk, and the words hadn’t come out maliciously like the screamer comment. He looks almost playful now, and Kagami just stands there and squints at him oddly, but the kid keeps grinning. 

He’s being teased, isn’t he.

_ ‘What’s this guy’s angle— what the hell is he smiling about?’  
_

Kagami’s not in the mood to joke. He doesn’t know how anyone could in a situation like theirs. It rubs him the wrong way how flippant this guy is about their fate in life. It’s especially strange considering he has it so much worse than Kagami, trapped in there.

He feels a pang in his stomach and thinks suddenly that he should have brought some food for him. He should’ve looked until he’d found some for him too.

“I found food,” he tells him, easing himself down to his level, a few yards back from the bars. Mother _fuck,_ he smells. Like shit and piss and vomit. He must be really dehydrated, because the smell of urine is really strong, so highly concentrated that it's eye-watering. 

“I think I can find more.”

The kid stares at him, sharp and analyzing. That seems to have irritated him. “Good for you,” he finally says, practically grits it out, like he thinks Kagami’s goading him or something.

Kagami scowls. He didn’t come here to fight through every sentence and snipe at each other until they both fall down dead. He tells the kid as much. “Look. I don’t care about your issues or how the fuck you ended up here. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is getting out of this alive.” 

If that means he has to get along with such an infuriating person, then _ fine— _

“Our situation is shit. I dunno’ how it could get worse really, and it’s not like there’s anyone else we can call for help. It’s just you and me stuck down here, so instead of wallowing about it, we should be thinking of what to do next.”

When he looks up, he kind of trails off. “We don’t have any other choice. We’re the ones who have to deal with this, so we’ve gotta’ stick together…”

Kagami goes quiet, and the kid eyes him, looking skeptical. It’s probably easy for Kagami to say they need to work as a team. He isn’t stuck in a cage, completely reliant on the mercy and generosity of someone else. Agreeing to stick together is more like Kagami agreeing to take care of the both of them, and Cage Kid doesn’t look too eager about the prospect.

It’s written all over his face that he full well knows that Kagami could leave him at any time if it’s strategic to his own chances to survive, just forget about him in here, give up on him and leave him to die— and he looks like he thinks Kagami _ will. _

“...” He stares at Kagami long and hard, there’s the wolf eyes again, cold and piercing, seeing into his soul, and just as Kagami’s opening his mouth to break the silence, the intensity of his gaze dies down.

“We both know how this ends,” he says, low and incredibly steady for what he’s admitting. “Just face it.”

Kagami stares at him, and it’s like there’s a block there, something that won’t let him comprehend what he’s saying or the mindset it comes from. He physically can’t wrap his brain around his bland acceptance of their fate, like he doesn’t want to even try. Like he wants to just wait for it and lay down and die.

“It’ll be easier,” he says, level and calm.

Kagami thinks of him in here alone, wonders how many days he spent alone down here, laying around and sleeping through it, waiting for death to come. He must have already screamed out all his hysterical screams, already exhausted himself panicking and trying to get out of his confines, he’s already cried and raged it all out and there’s no fight left in him. 

He’s been here long enough already that he’s probably done everything he can think of. Gone through the stages of denial and anger and despair. He has the look about him that he’s exhausted every possible way out of this and has come to see that there’s just no escaping. There’s nothing left now but a tired acceptance of what would come. 

Now that he’s reached the end, he doesn’t want someone to bring him hope.

He stares into Kagami’s eyes, pinning him there, and his gaze already looks glassy and distant. This time it’s not what Kagami sees there, but rather what he doesn’t see. Some spark of the person he once was, some pinprick of light, a will to live on.

“No,” Kagami says, swallowing hard, the word coming out breathy instead of firm. “No, it’s not over.”

Not now that he’s here— 

“We can make it,” he tells him. “We’re gonna’ make it.” He believes that with all his heart. He has to. It’s the only thing he can do in their situation to keep from succumbing to that same sense of despair. Hold onto that fire he’s lived with all his life, believe that he’ll see his home again, someday, if he just keeps a candle burning.

He stares into Kagami’s eyes, into his earnest face, and narrows his eyes, mouth souring. Just as confused by his stubborn refusal to buckle as Kagami is by his passive acceptance.

“You know there’s no way out.”

“No, we don’t.” Kagami shakes his head again and again and again, shuffles a little closer, stares in at him. He’s not going to give up. Saying it out loud, it bolsters his confidence, motivates him to keep his head up. Gives him something to keep living for. “We can find one.”

Kagami meets his blank-eyed stare with a sort of desperation. “Promise,” he commands, the echo shooting back. “We’re gonna’ get out together,” he rasps softer.

In the coming days — _ weeks, if they make it that long — _they won’t have anything left to hang onto but each other. This stranger is the only companion that he has for the moment. They need to be in this together. To encourage each other to live. Some reason to push each other to keep on hoping.

The kid looks at him for a long time. Kagami doesn’t know what he’s seeing there as he looks from one eye to the other, back and forth, something softening at the corners, the flesh between his brows unpinching, almost inquisitive.

His lip twitches, and at last he says, “Yeah sure, Kagami,” like he isn’t quite taking him seriously, but is willing to at least play along for the moment.

There’s a momentary sense of surprise, _ he remembered my name— _

He sticks his hand through the bars, a tan hand with long monkey fingers extended towards him, eyes unwavering and cynical. 

Kagami shakes it even though he knows it’s probably the shit hand.

Satisfied for the moment, Kagami stands up and circles the cage. He curiously braces his weight against the corner and tries to push it, leans into it and shoves his feet on the ground, but it’s too heavy to move. 

Its occupant watches him silently, leaning back on his hands and watching him pace around. He’s probably tried it all already but he lets him try too. Feeling stumped, Kagami squats in front of the cage, squinting. It does have a door with hinges on one side, and a panel with a keyhole.

Fist on his mouth, Kagami furrows his brow. “Is there a key?”

“Pff,” he snorts. “What for.”

He’s flippant about it, like this was a truly hilarious notion. He even gives Kagami this quirk of his brow, as if it’s funny he was naive enough to even wonder.

That puts Kagami ill at ease. When they’d put him in there, he was never meant to get back out again. He’s supposed to rot behind those bars. _ Die. _Locked away and never to leave again.

Kagami doesn’t get it. They’re already trapped enough as it is with the boulders on the cellar door barricading them in. Locked in a tiny cell only fit for transporting a circus animal— a cage within a cage.

It’s so gratuitous.

What on earth could he have done that was so horrible to merit that treatment. What’s the point of going so over the top? He doesn’t understand, unless perhaps it’s meant as some humiliation, to shame him in death. There might not be a deeper meaning to it, and was likely just an act of pure cruelty, an attempt to increase his suffering, but Kagami does have to wonder— if the punishment fits the crime, and if what Kagami has done equals exile and death by starvation in a mountain cave, what has _ he _ done to be put here?

Again, at this point, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter what kind of person this boy once was, or what he’d done to get here. All that Kagami can be concerned with is their current circumstances. There’s no point rehashing the past and fuck knows he doesn’t want to look through his. Not until they escape at least. If that day comes, then maybe. But until now, those painful memories can only serve as a spur in his side, spite to fuel him. They’re no use to him otherwise.

Kagami picks up a rock. 

“Maybe I can break it.”

The hinges might be a weak point. If he hammers away at it long enough, then maybe— 

“What, no,” he refuses. “Get away.”

Kagami frowns, lip stuck out. “Whadda’ you mean, _ no.” _

Jerkface sticks his hand out through the bars and swipes it at him to shoo him back. Kagami lets loose a disbelieving huff. “What, you’re telling me you’re having fun in there?” he says skeptically, folding his arms, rock in hand. 

“Squished in a goddamn cage, shitting yourself and starving?”

“Whatcha’ mean?” His voice is light and teasing. He clearly just doesn’t want Kagami to waste his energy in a pointless venture, but he keeps up the joke instead of telling him right out. He knocks a knuckle on a cage bar, a low ringing metal clunk. “This is to keep _ you _ out, handsome.”

He grins. It stretches his sallow face and makes it look younger. He and Kagami both know it’s a joke. Kagami’s wasting away already after ten days on an extremely poor diet, his musculature and the youthful glow in his face dimming and weakening with filth and hunger. No one could call him handsome now.

Same with this outrageous idiot and his stupid, purposeless teasing. Kagami thinks he must have been good looking before he ended up here. The bones of his skull outline a visage that had once been proud and fierce, a high forehead and sharp brows, a beautifully sculpted face, but his eyes have sunk in their sockets, his skin is discolored, his expression is heavy set, the lines and creases dug in like cement, scars of hardship. 

The smile that Kagami might recognize as boyish and playful had he known him a lifetime before they’d ended up here, that smile is etched into a skull barely left alive. The youth has utterly drained from his face— a face that must have been young and handsome once. 

Kagami narrows his eyes, an eyebrow raised. “You like it in there, huh,” he scoffs, pursing his lips, but his heart feels lighter as some humor returns, beats the hopelessness back and keeps it at bay.

Just talking to someone, really— another kid his age, immaturity he recognizes in himself, he’s feeling a little better.

“Yeah.” He’s still smirking cheekily and now that he seems assured that Kagami’s not coming for his bars, he settles on his back with his arms behind his head. “Comfy.”

Kagami scrunches his brow, but it makes him smile. Crooked, cutting into one cheek as he squints down at this weird, _ weird _guy who’s lounging on his back, luxurious as a cat.

“Nice view too.”

If that wasn’t enough, he keeps laying there and leers through the bars, eyes shooting up his body from his grubby bare feet to his baffled face. He grins up at him, bold as brass. Where the hell he gets the balls to make a display like that, Kagami has no idea.

Kagami stares at him, brow furrowed. The grin grows. At last, Kagami just snorts.

He sits down next to the bars, careful to choose a spot that doesn't look too sticky with congealed pee, and Mr. Insufferable Cruiser’s eyes positively glow. Kagami has to fight the twist to his own lip.

He’s starting to grow on him. Just a little. Even if he is pretty unbearable.

Kagami folds his legs and his companion springs up to meet him, rolling himself up and crouching close to the bars, pressed against them. Kagami could reach out and touch him if he wanted. If not for the bars between them, it’d almost be like sitting around on the floor at home on the rug like he used to with his brother, sock feet propped in front of the fireplace after the hunt. It feels like such a long time ago—

“So where’d you go?” Kagami snaps out of his reverie, looking up. Blue eyes meet his. They remind him of the underground lake in the cave, the choppy surface of the black water running deep. They seem curious, more than he’s seen them look thus far, maybe because the lanky brat has decided to actually pick his eyelids up past half mast for once. He must’ve finally quit pretending Kagami was about to bore him to sleep at any second.

“Other part of the cave.”

“It keeps going?” After his behavior thus far, uninterested and aloof, Kagami felt a little surprised at how curious he looked. It’s like he’s broke down some barrier or peeled back a layer and had to reevaluate everything he thought he’d already figured out about the guy. It’s like he has to get a feel for him all over again.

_ Pff— Not with those bars in the way, he won’t. _

“How far?” Kagami blinks again. He’s looking at him expectantly. Kagami shakes himself slightly. Quit zoning out, idiot.

“I dunno’ yet.” Shifting, Kagami puts one knee up and rests his arm there. “I found running water though,” he shares. “And a room with part of the ceiling caved in.”

He looks interested. He’s quiet, like he’s waiting for him to go on. Maybe he wishes he could see it for himself.

Kagami tries his best to describe it. While he’d been walking through the woods, tied up and raging, this guy had been down here, laying alone and smelling like ass, staring at the same wall for ages on end, trying to hang onto his grip on reality. Kagami tries to paint a picture in the darkness for him. He doesn’t think he does so well, but he tries.

“There’s a waterfall,” he recounts, tells him about the underground lake and the skylight in the mossy cavern. He sits and listens, silent in rapt attention. 

“There’s other tunnels too, but they’re too dark, so I haven’t looked there yet…” 

A teasing smile, lip lifted to flash some teeth. Eyes that are starting to look warm. “Don’t get lost back there.”

Kagami snorts. “Yeah?” Maybe it’s a little mean-spirited, but he thinks after all the teasing, he deserves to be an asshole back. "Or what. You’ll die of loneliness?” 

Instead of irritating or ruffling him, like he’d perhaps hoped to do, this cocky shit just cranks it up a notch. “Well I need _ something _pretty to look at.”

“Pff,” Kagami spits, and can’t help but start laughing. He does too. It’s a nice noise to hear echoing back.

“Gotta’ keep my spirits up somehow.”

“Yeah okay,” he mutters sarcastically, earning a breathy snicker. He doesn’t know what this repeated banter is meant to accomplish, what his angle is, if he’s trying to get under his skin or is genuinely playing around with him, harmlessly teasing. 

“You’re not so bad yourself,” Kagami concedes, giving into the game he was playing, whatever it was.

He likes that response. Kagami doesn’t know what he gets out of it, but he must like it, because he sits there and shows his teeth. He grins and grins, eyes crinkling at the edges. It utterly transforms his face.

Kagami’s smile falls. He swallows hard. Heart flips. Stomach drops. A feeling he remembers well. A moment cut from a life since stolen away from him—  


He just keeps on smiling. Kagami looks away.

“I’m Aomine.” This draws his gaze back. He’s not showing his teeth anymore, but his mouth is still quirked playfully to one side. He’s looking at Kagami completely differently all of a sudden. Like he hasn't been seeing him clearly until now. Kagami’s starting to feel the same way about him.

“Daiki,” he says after a beat.

Kagami knows that name. He knows he does, but he can’t remember why.

He does remember that it was something really bad.

A shadow passes through his brain, and he falls silent for a beat when his mind goes to a dark place. And for a moment he wonders who he’s seeing now, if the boy he’s talking to now is the same one who’d glared him down with the eyes of a wolf, steady and piercing, not quite manic, but there’s something wild there— 

All at once passive and yet incredibly intense, like the power that lay dormant within a sleeping tiger— Was that mellow, spiteful, and almost suicidally bored facade Aomine’s true face, or was it this boyish pest. Which was the front, and which was Aomine showing his true colors.

Kagami’s not certain he’ll ever be sure of who exactly he’s talking to.

“Good,” he says, hears it ring hollow in his own ears. “Cause’ I’ve named you Jerkface in my head until now.”

Aomine looks mildly irked with his tone, but seems pleased that Kagami’s pushing back. Because all he does is grin and joke around some more.

“Don’t make me come out there.”

Kagami smirks. Funny guy.

For how rude he’d been in the beginning, Aomine seems to have warmed up to him, because he turns downright friendly. Whatever it was that made him feel like opening up, whether it was warming up to Kagami and deciding he was worthwhile to talk to, or whether it was deciding that being a jerk out of spite was ultimately counterproductive, Aomine seems to have done a one eighty. 

Instead of acting annoyed and making sure Kagami knew he was unwelcome, remaining aloof and disinterested in everything about him, even going so far as to get hostile, Aomine now seemed quite openly pleased to have him there. Maybe he’d sussed Kagami out as a good guy and decided to drop the thorns. At any rate, having even just one friend in the world seems to have done him good.

He doesn’t quit the goddamn flirting, that’s for sure.

Kagami sits with him for a long time, loosely hugging his wrist around his knees. Aomine’s talkative now, seeming glad for the company. He wonders how lonely it must have been, all alone down here in the dark. Unable to even measure the hours as they went by. Nothing to do but sleep and masturbate to pass the time. 

Sitting here with him and rebuffing his harmless teasing, Kagami comes to realize that Aomine’s a funny guy. Considering the hopelessness of their situation, while Kagami is only able to face it with determination, Aomine can joke about it, and quite morbidly so.

It bothers Kagami a lot at first, because he doesn’t see where it comes from and doesn’t appreciate it. Doesn’t want to think about dying, let alone joke about their demise. The time to face it is after it’s already happened, and not before— but Aomine seems to have a different way of coping with it all. Making a huge joke out of it, like he doesn’t care at all, this black humor that is half-teasing with an underlying dark tone that is probably what disturbs Kagami most.

He says once that when he croaks, Kagami has his permission to eat his meat and use the bones. With a big old smirk on his face.

“You already promised,” Kagami snaps, louder than he’d meant in his attempt to get him to just shut up about it. When Aomine’s eyes shutter, expression closing off, Kagami amends, “Too late,” a bit quieter.

Aomine smirks again, taking the tacit apology as carte blanche to keep pushing his luck. Kagami suppresses a groan. “When I die, at least make some good jerky.”

“Whatever.” Aomine seems to get that he’s jumping on a nerve when Kagami keeps being short with him. 

Maybe it doesn’t upset him so much particularly that Aomine was making a joke of such a hopeless situation, but that just for a moment, sitting here and talking with him, seeing a youthful spark in his eyes gone dull, Kagami had let himself forget where they were and what fate they were doomed to meet. He hadn’t known how much he needed that escape until Aomine’s stupid jokes brought his attention back to the hand of death on their backs.

“C’mon, Kagami,” Aomine says, almost soft, lips curled. “We both know who’s got a chance to make it outta’ this— if either of us do.”

Kagami doesn’t know why he’s telling him this. Maybe to show him that he’s made peace with it already and don’t trouble himself so much, don’t kick up such a fuss when he talks about dying, because it’s an inevitability of their circumstances. Maybe because he doesn’t want Kagami to feel sorry for him. Whatever the reason, Kagami doesn’t accept it.

“We’re both making it,” he grit out stubbornly.

“What, we both make it or neither of us do?” Aomine teases, just as stubborn in his refusal to match his harsh tone. “So when I croak, you’re just gonna’ off yourself? And waste all that meat? C’mon, I’ve always wanted to be a steak.”

“I’m not fucking eating your stupid body.” Kagami wishes he’d wipe that look off his face, and he wishes he didn’t find it so irritating and endearing in equal parts. 

“You’re probably too tough and stringy to chew.” He shouldn’t play his game, but something about it is getting him wound up. He just wishes he’d shut up about it already.

“Well don’t just lemme’ putrefy and turn into cave goop.” He’s gripping the bars, peeking out at him. “C’mon, wanna’ take a taste-test?” he teases, sticking his arm out.

“You’re gonna’ make it.”

_ “If _ I don’t.”

Kagami’s just about had enough, so he gets really close, staring at him with narrowed eyes. If his aim is to intimidate, it doesn’t have the intended effect, because Aomine grins wildly, face against the bars. It’s more like Aomine’s worn him down with his banter, enough so that he could be goaded into teasing him back.

“Listen very carefully, numbnuts,” he says, taking special care to keep his voice hushed and level. 

Aomine just looks positively gleeful as he gets right up in his face, their noses maybe an inch or two apart, and bites out, _ “I’m not a fucking cannibal.” _

Looking thrilled to his toes, Aomine seems to shake himself and perk up as Kagami pulls away sharply and stands.

“Unlike some people,” he says pointedly, and Aomine lets out a breathy laugh.

“Aw c’mon, I was joking about your arm earlier!” he crows. Scooted up to the wall like that with his legs up, he rests his elbows on his kneecaps, hanging his arms out through the bars.

“Kind of.” He gives Kagami another once-over. “I sure wouldn't mind biting off a piece of that sometime.”

“I change my mind. I’ll eat your head first.”

Aomine likes that. He throws his head back and laughs. “Hahaha—” He keeps on laughing like that, the noise higher and freer than Kagami would’ve expected. With a deep voice like his he would’ve expected a low lazy chuckle, but his laughter rings through the cave, flowing in and out of Kagami’s ears like bells. His eyes squint almost shut with the smile. 

When he stops, he sighs and looks up at Kagami. It’s the kind of smile that makes him smile too just looking at it.

“You’re somethin’, Kagami. How come this is the first time we’re meeting?”

Kagami huffs and can’t help but grin, shaking his head. What an unbearable flirt.

Aomine’s told him that he’d been here for maybe a couple days before Kagami came. He doesn’t know for sure, not because of lack of light but because he’d slept a lot to pass the time and thinks he may have lost a day. He'd hoped it would keep him from going insane all alone, or at least slow the process.

Kagami can tell how glad he is not to be doomed to utter solitude, and even though he doesn’t seem to really believe they’ll get out or have a real hope for survival the way Kagami does, he seems glad at least, not to have to die alone.

If Kagami had to pick between getting thrown down here on his own, and whatever this is, he’d say he’s glad to have Aomine here too, even if he’s the sort of guy that would’ve driven him bonkers back home— a careless brat who can’t take anything seriously and who teases relentlessly to see just how much he can get away with, as if he actually thinks he’s smooth.

But he’s not the worst person he could’ve ended up with, that’s for sure. 

Kagami’s stomach makes some noise, gurgling as he digests what little is left in his gut. He presses his fist to the pit of his stomach as if he can squash the howling cries of hunger. Aomine’s hands drop from the bars in an almost identical move, and Kagami watches his face change.

He gulps hard, eyes going round, the flinty faraway gaze of a wolf, silent as the snow— but something else he hasn’t revealed until now. A clawing, almost feral desperation. 

Kagami doesn’t speak. Just stares at him for a long time, pinned there, transfixed by what he sees, ravenous longing on the brink of absolute madness.

And in a voice that practically quavers, Aomine finally whispers out, “Did you really find food down there?”

There’s a vulnerability there that Kagami knows he wouldn't have been privy to a day ago, hell, even an hour ago when he’d gone so far as to deny he was even hungry, a lie so flagrant it was obviously not even meant to be believed for a second. Nothing more than a spiteful deflection—

Maybe he’s identified Kagami as someone trustworthy enough to show his belly to, someone worth groveling to if it meant he got fed, because Aomine has dropped the aloof act completely.

He looks absolutely voracious now, his eyes begging. Kagami watches him lick his cracked lips.

“Not that much,” Kagami admits reluctantly. 

The manic glint of hope drains from Aomine’s face. Instead of resigned, as he would have expected, Kagami’s met with a look of despair. Aomine grips the bars, crestfallen, crazed by misery.

“Is there... enough for me?” he ventures, hesitant, _ share some with me— please, oh god— _

“What do you want, I can give you…” Aomine shuffles back from the bars. “Uh…” He looks around, feels in his pockets. He has nothing, but he looks anyway for _ something _ he can give him.

He looks like he’s about to offer the clothes off his back, promise him money once they’ve escaped, offer to suck his dick— _ just bring him something to eat— _

“Hey,” Kagami stops him. “No need.” Seeing him look like that, it writhes like a worm in Kagami’s gut, pinched in the middle and still wiggling with both the pieces, flailing in agony after getting cut with a thumbnail.

Aomine keeps clinging to the bars, and he looks more like a starving trapped animal than ever. Kagami crouches in front of him. “I said we’re in this together.” Aomine looks up at him, eyes wide and lost.

“We’re not gonna’ starve,” Kagami tells him firmly. He puts his hand on Aomine’s, grips it tight. It feels so bony on the cold metal. “We’re not gonna’ starve—”

_ ‘I won’t let you starve.’ _

Aomine swallows, looking absolutely ragged, pressing a fist into his sunken gut, and for the first time, he seems to latch onto Kagami’s stubborn, perhaps naive confidence. His eyes flick back and forth between each of Kagami’s, his pupils quivering like pinpricks. Whether or not he thinks an escape is really possible, he seems to hang onto that, desperately wants to believe him— that _ soon… soon he’s going to eat again. _

He’s got no choice but to rely on Kagami to get them through. Without Kagami, he’s helpless.

Maybe that’s why he’d seemed so resigned to his fate before, and why he looked so desperate now. Because before, death was a certainty. 

With Kagami here, there’s a chance, however small, that maybe— 

_ ‘I won’t let you starve. I definitely won’t.’ _

Aomine nods at last, unsteady, breathing through his mouth, raspy and loud. Kagami takes his hand away, sitting back on his haunches.

“What did you find?” he says after a wet gulp. “What did you eat?”

“I found some mushrooms that seem safe. There might be more if I keep looking.” Aomine shifts, hands sliding on the bars. Kagami can see them shake when he unclenches them. 

“There’s fish down here too but… I dunno’.” Kagami rubs his neck. He’s pretty sure that’s not a viable option.

“Why not,” Aomine snaps, practically crying out in frustration, a strained yelp that echoes back.

“I tried, I’m no good!” Kagami hollers back, feeling a bit of that helpless frustration shadow him again. His ineptitude and clumsiness can’t be the thing that dooms them to starvation. 

Aomine gives him this odd look then, face scrunching up. “It’s not so hard. What kind of idiot can’t catch a fish?”

“I never fucking learned,” Kagami grit out, scrubbing a hand over his head. He sighs roughly, and then mutters, “I’m too slow.” 

Kagami knew how to hunt, but not in the way the poor folk did, hunting and trapping and fishing, skilled and at ease in nature because they were taught from childhood. The livelihood of their families oftentimes relied on their success, so their skill was a necessity. 

All Kagami was taught was how to hunt for sport, on horseback. He wouldn’t have even learned how to swim if he hadn’t run off so often to play with the tenants’ children— 

Aomine purses his lips and Kagami feels defensive. “Not all of us got taught how to survive in the wilderness, so I’m kind of struggling here—”

“Oh, like I’m doing so hot,” Aomine snorts. Kagami picks his head up from his palms. He’s smirking a little. “I shit myself in a cage like a zoo animal.”

Kagami just stares, brow pinching. It’s still startling that he can make fun of his own situation like that. Aomine’s snickering about it though, even though Kagami isn’t.

“C’mon, it’s kinda’ funny,” he prods, and Kagami finally quirks a smile. “Just keep it between us, okay?”

“I won’t tell anyone,” he mumbles. Like there’s anyone to tell down here anyways— 

Aomine grins wider when he plays along. It manages to lift his spirits the tiniest amount. “You’d better not,” he hums, leaning back in the corner, stretching his legs out as much as possible, arms up behind his head. 

“My reputation.”

Kagami snorts humorlessly.

His own is gone as it is. Even after he gets out of here, he’s not going to come home to a warm welcome.

He wonders again how Aomine got himself in here. It’s likely for equal or worse— what kind of home did he have to go back to? Was there a place he could go? Did he have… family? Who is out there missing him?

“When you get out,” Kagami rasps, “you can show me how.”

Aomine looks at him for a long time, eyes deep and distant. At last he smiles a little, the barest breath of a laugh.

“Sure, Kagami,” he says, humoring him.

“They’re pretty fast.”

Aomine seems to come out of the fog, smirking a little more, settling his head on his linked palms, shifting his back on the uncomfortable bars. “No one’s saying you gotta’ catch ‘em by hand.”

Kagami sits and stares off into space, chin on his fist. He’s feeling even slower and stupider than usual, what little food he’d found gone into fueling his body. His brain’s on its own for the time being. 

He’s seen villagers catch fish out on the docks, pulling in huge nets from their longboats. Obviously that was out, but maybe a fishing pole was more realistic. If he could find a stick, maybe he could use string from his shirt. What about a hook…

“Maybe I can make a net,” he mutters.

He has the rope from his binds, and his shirt. He could tie a knot in the bottom of his shirt and then use the rope to attach the top of the shirt to a stick, then try to scoop something up.

“You’ll get it, big guy.” Aomine shows his teeth.

“Yeah,” he grunts. ‘_ I have to—’ _They both know he has to.

When there’s nothing left to say, they fall silent.

The light peeking through the cracks has dimmed. It’s harder to see Aomine’s face with each passing minute, black with shadow. It’s time for Kagami to go back to camp and sleep.

It feels wrong somehow though, walking off and leaving Aomine on his own. Should he stay? Kagami doesn’t feel right about it.

He can see that despite looking easygoing and carefree for the moment, the way Aomine’s body trembles and sways with effort, he knows the horrors of starvation must be setting in. After too long spent hungry, his body’s already started to eat at his fat stores, wasting him away to the bones. Vertigo, black vision, dehydration, a gut spent so long empty that it doesn’t even feel hunger anymore, just clenches in pain—

He’s been in here starving even longer than Kagami has, without even a drink of water, not a single morsel. At least Kagami had been fed once on the way up here, and could drink from the river now, could walk around to find food in the cave— Aomine’s been forced to sit here and starve, waiting patiently until he succumbed to dehydration or shit his brains out from diarrhea. Or until he picked up some cave bug and his weak immunity couldn’t withstand the sickness. Or until he just wasted away, his lungs and heart finally failing him.

It’s a pitiful sight, his skinny legs and arms, the way his sleeves hang. He’s not a small guy either, and Kagami can see that where muscle and fat should be, the flesh has retreated. Worse is how starved his face looks, how hollow his eyes look set in his skull.

“I’ll come tomorrow,” he promises, _ and he’ll bring food and water first thing—  
_

Aomine snorts lightly, waves two fingers above his head. “I’ll be here,” he jokes. Kagami grins.

Aomine’s eyes follow him as he stands, watching him go. Kagami hesitantly shuffles towards the mouth of the tunnel, not eager to make the walk through the dark. Kagami holds a hand up and waves. It’s pitiful looking at him cramped up in there on the ground, peering through the bars.

He turns reluctantly and puts his hand on the wall, cool stone against his palm. 

“See you, Kagami,” Aomine calls, voice strained just slightly, pitched with the hopelessness of his situation. He’s completely reliant on Kagami to return. It’s not like he can follow after him if he decides not to come back. That helpless quiver stops Kagami in his tracks for a second.

“Night,” he says.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's time to eat, boys.

In the morning, Kagami walks to the pool.  
  


It had taken him a long time to go to sleep last night, laying awake and staring up at the sky, restlessly tossing and turning on the cold stones beneath and thinking about home, thinking about Aomine— was it cold and uncomfortable, sleeping in that cage? Was it especially lonely, after finally being able to talk to someone and see their face, to sleep alone?

He wakes up groggy and with a pounding headache. He lays still for a time, unwilling to rise, but can’t fall asleep again on the bed of rocks, damp and cold from morning dew.

After many hours spent trying to fall asleep last night, laying and thinking with only the deep hum of nothingness and the occasional distant echoing drip to break the silence, Kagami’s somewhat glad to be immersed in the echoing roar of the waterfall spilling and crashing to the surface of the pool. Even if it’s really dark, he’ll trade sight for sound once in a while. 

Half-heartedly, Kagami rolls up his pant legs to below his knees, wades into the chilly shallows, and squints around for the fish. He comes to it with a frustrated, _ I can’t do this _attitude and his determination and desperation to catch food isn’t enough to overtake that bone-deep certainty that there was just no point in trying. 

Teeth gritted, Kagami slaps his hands into the water again and again, stooping there and waiting for them to swim close, but every single time, they dart out of his grip. Even when he’s _ almost _ fast enough— _ so close— _their slippery bodies zip out from between his fingers.

He tries and tries for what feels like hours, fruitlessly trying to catch a fish barehanded, but he just can’t do it, and it just makes him sore all over and simmering with fury.

After what seems like the thousandth failure, Kagami manages not to go into another tantrum, which is as it should be, because in the end all they do is consume time and precious energy, and he needs to keep a clear head as much as he possibly can— It’s hard though, not to give into a howling rage, why, why is this happening, why does he have to be here underground and not home with his father? Why can’t he do this, food is _ right there, _so why can’t he just— 

There’s no point. There’s no point to thoughts like that and he knows it but he can’t stop himself when he starts. It’s like steam building under the lid of a pot, rattling it back and forth as it escapes first on one side, then the other, just a small stream of it, a single puff before the lid clacks back into place and settles there, trembling and waiting for the inevitable explosion. 

Kagami digs his fists into his eyes and exhales slowly. Instead of trudging back to shore through the clay just yet, he wades to a large rock poking out of the shimmering bed of glittering black glass and sits himself down, feet dangling in. He wipes his forehead with his wet wrist. He stares at the dark water and the ghostly backs of the fish that wander within. He looks unseeing upon the white foam floating on the choppy surface beneath the falls, and he begins to despair. Because he’s not the only one who’s going to go hungry.  
  


He can’t just show up empty-handed. He has to bring Aomine _ something— _

  
Water. At the very least, Aomine needs water. 

  
Kagami looks down at the water’s surface, almost smooth where it gently laps at his ankles. It’s too dark to even see the shadow of his own reflection there looking back from the surface, nothing but the outline of his silhouette, if that. He furrows his brows and cups his hands together, thoughtfully dunking them in the water, rippling the black outline of his head to bits. He tries to raise a handful to his lips. If he’s fast, he can drink from his palms.

Clenching his hands together hard, Kagami takes a scoop, cupping it as tightly as he can, but as he sits and stares into the tiny pool, it drips and drains through his knuckles, soon no more than a dewdrop, glimmering like a jewel in his quivering grip.

He can’t possibly carry more than a few drops all the way to Aomine in his hands. Can he suck some up in his mouth and hold it in his cheeks maybe? That’s a little gross, but as they get more desperate, that’s starting to matter less and less.  
  


Besides, he's only halfway sure Aomine would say no to receiving mouth to mouth—   
  


He tries to look for a rock or anything he could possibly carry water in, even just a little bit of water, enough to swallow. 

His tiny obsidian reflection slips through his fingers again and again, and at last Kagami brings his wet palms to his face and scrubs them back and forth, ruffles them through his hair, almost violently.

He means to stand up, but ends up slipping off the rock, going down into the frigid water. _ “Shit,” _he yelps, managing to correct himself, but not before soaking himself up to his armpits. It wasn’t too deep here, but he’d felt his ass touch the soft mud, and the only thing left dry was his hair.

“Are you _ fucking— _” Kagami puffs his cheeks up and manages to wade to shore with little more than some heated mumbling and cursing. Teeth chattering, he pulls himself out onto shore, yanks his shirt over his head, balls it up, and hurls it to the rock floor. The loud wet slap is satisfying somewhat.

He removes his pants and wrings them out as much as possible, but it’s no good, he’s dripping all over, his flesh icy and damp. His shirt’s a pitiful soaked pile of white cotton gone grey with dust, the gentle waves on shore lapping and tugging at it.

Kagami picks it up, the fabric heavy and hanging out of shape, trickling rivulets spilling onto his feet. He glares at the shapeless mass, spread it out in front of him and grips the sleeves.  
  


Actually… the longer he stares…  
  


_ ‘Wait… What if I…’ _ Kagami frowns, an idea dawning on him. _ ‘No, wait, _ could _ I though—?’ _

  
Kagami slaps the shirt back into the river, bringing it up soaking and heavy. Yeah, there we go. Feeling a spark of hope start buzzing in his stomach, Kagami allows himself a satisfied smirk. _ Yes— _

Nose running, shivering head to toe, especially without a shirt on to hold the heat in, Kagami holds the wet bundle in his arms, careful not to squeeze it, and drips a trail all the way back to Aomine, who sits up when he approaches, putting his hands on the cage bars.

“Kagami,” he calls, voice cracking on the word.

He looks like he’s been waiting. Kagami doesn’t know what he feels about that, a mix of pleasure and some guilt. 

He coughs, and then picks his fist up and coughs into it again. He covers it with a smile that shouldn’t be so charming on such a dirty starved face. “What took ya’, good lookin’?” 

It should irritate him. Any other time, it would. If he were back home right now and Aomine were some boy working the food stalls at the market, chasing at his heels and teasing and picking at him day in and day out, even if it might charm him, Kagami would be annoyed by such pestering and would probably tell him off for it. 

Partly because he doesn’t understand what this guy thinks he’s doing. Doesn’t know why he still keeps up with that bullshit. Thinks in part, that Aomine’s making fun of him— What else could it be. It’s not like that nonsense is any more serious than the way he swears his cage is the most comfortable place in the cave. 

Kagami doesn’t think anyone’s ever been so ridiculously bold to flirt so openly with him, never in his life. 

And right now, after a hard morning, to be greeted with a smile, however shit-eating and silly it is, it feels like just what Kagami needs.

Aomine's eyes peer out at him expectantly, eager and darting all over him, and Kagami feels a bolt of shame. He presses his lips together and can’t quite bring himself to tell him that he’d failed in finding him any food— but he does walk up to the bars with the dripping shirt, standing at the side of the cage.

Aomine seems to understand immediately, and it’s like the human mind before him melts away, leaving behind the animal beneath. He shoves his face onto the bars, straining against them, mouth open, tongue contorting, a wild look in his eyes— a starving beast that hadn’t a care for constructs like dignity and pride, didn’t need to keep up a strong front, just _ needed water— _

Kagami unwraps part of his shirt, the sleeve, still sopping wet, and Aomine takes it in feeble fingers, stuffing it in his mouth, probably farther in than he should. He starts sucking on it ravenously, throat working as he draws the water out.

It keeps dripping, creating a puddle on the floor, wasted droplets wetting the dust at their feet. Kagami watches his throat contort, adam’s apple sliding back and forth as he swallows and sucks at the cloth to quench his thirst, satisfy a gaping hole in his gut that cries to be filled. Aomine’s huffing through his nose, quick quiet gasps of air. His eyes are blown wide, pupils large and black. He seems so helpless, like a blind kitten suckling at Kagami's finger. A fragile life in his hands, a tiny fluttering struggle for survival. It's a pitiful sight. 

Kagami swallows hard because it's tough to watch. He holds the rest of the shirt above the cage to try and let the water drain down into the part Aomine was trying to drink from. When Aomine seems to come out of that desperate moment, too ravenous to care about his humiliatingly vulnerable position, practically groveling on his knees at Kagami’s mercy, he starts using his hands to wring and squeeze the fabric, push water into his mouth.

Kagami twists the top to force it down towards him. Aomine opens his mouth and lets the runoff drip in. His tongue is a dirty gray.

When it's run dry and he can’t get more than a few drops to spill from Kagami’s shirt, balled up and twisted like a rag in Aomine’s straining hands, he seems satisfied for the moment, relinquishes it from his grip, fingers crooked and pink at the tips. Kagami slaps it out, wrinkly and damp, laying it over a rock, turning his back to Aomine, lets him wipe his face and compose himself for a moment of what they can pretend is privacy.

“Food?” Aomine rasps, and Kagami’s shoulders tense.

He turns, but he doesn’t want to look at him. Doesn’t want to see what a devastating disappointment it’s going to be. 

Kagami opens his mouth. Flicks his eyes up. Aomine’s waiting, gripping the bars, eyes round and almost manic with hope, like he thinks Kagami must just have it in his pocket, or is thinking of keeping it for himself and Aomine just has to beg a little harder— 

He shakes his head, and Aomine’s face falls. It puts a lump in his throat.

“I tried,” he tries to explain. “I…” Kagami runs a hand through his hair and stares at his knees. He's already feeling the pressure of trying and failing to sustain them both, letting down a person who's desperately relying on him, letting himself down. And maybe in trying so hard to keep his temper, the fear that usually turns straight to anger, instead—

Kagami balls up his fists, gripping his damp pant legs. Keeps his eyes low. Bites lips that start to quiver.

“Hey. Hey, it doesn't matter. Not important now,” Aomine brushes off, so unexpectedly kind about it that Kagami digs his wrist into his eyes and swallows hard. “What're our other options.”

Kagami looks up, and Aomine’s holding the bars in loose fists. He seems to be trying to skate through it like always, as if he just doesn’t care one way or the other, but even with the lazy eyes and the easy grin on his lips, there’s an urgency in his face that just makes Kagami feel rotten. 

“If the fish are a no, then what else." Kagami stares silently, uncomprehending. “I’m past being picky, bring me anything. Anything.”

Crowding the bars, he lists, “Mud. Moss. Seriously, anything I can swallow.”

Kagami stares at him glumly, the gurgling empty feeling squeezing his gut and crawling up his throat echoing in Aomine’s expression. “It doesn't even have to be food, just bring me something. As long as I can eat it, I don't fucking care,” he wrenches out. 

A note of panic finds its way into Aomine’s steady voice. “I have to eat something, I don’t care what.”

Kagami sets his jaw. 

“Even you’re lookin’ pretty tasty,” Aomine jokes weakly. Kagami doesn’t smile back. 

It’s a pitiful sight, a boy with the ghost of a spirit that must have once been so proud and wild, looking up at him through metal bars with a crooked grin. Maybe it’s meant to be encouraging.

“Throw me a bone, handsome,” he teases. “Stick something good through the bars for me.”

He stands sharply. 

“I’ll be back later,” Kagami announces. Aomine blinks, watches as he picks up the shredded tangle of rope in the corner and the sharp rock he’d cut himself free with. He slings his shirt over his shoulder, and disappears down the dark tunnel. 

  
  


Kagami spends most of the day foraging in the cave. His mental state, perhaps fragile and worn for the moment, hadn’t abided another try fishing just yet, so instead he’d wandered down a few yet unexplored passages that he’d felt brave enough to venture into a ways. 

He at last brings back his meagre sum to Aomine to share.

Aomine perks up when he sees him coming. Kagami could see him laying boredly on his side, picking his hand through the bars and tracing in the dirt, but when he comes through the doorway of the tunnel, he sits up and cranes his neck.

“You're back. You find anything?”

“Yeah. Some.”

Kagami isn’t sure Aomine knows he does it, but he sort of jolts and wriggles. It’s like his entire body is screaming— _ food, there’s really food— _

“Whatcha’ got?” he chirps, but it’s a little too strained to simply sound curious.

It’s dim now in the evening, but still considerably lighter than the pitch black tunnel. Aomine crosses his legs and scoots close to look out. Kagami approaches his cage and sits down right at the bars. He already can’t wait for his nose to adjust again so that he won’t smell Aomine and the filth he’s rolling in— 

He lays down his shirt, carefully wrapped into a bundle around the things he’d found. 

During his exploring, he’d wandered down a tunnel that led off from the waterfall cavern, following a fairly deep outlet of water, draining quite swiftly from the pool, cutting into the ground until it disappeared when the tunnel ceiling sank and met the water’s surface. In so doing, it created a sort of dead-end to the trail. He’d crept forward as far as he’d dared in the damp space, but the walls were wide enough that he felt confident that there was no way he could get himself stuck. When he’s placed his hand at the place where the rock met the river, he discovered that there under the surface was a cluster of branches, a dead tree, dragged here by flood waters perhaps—

He’d tentatively put his leg into the water, but he can’t feel the bottom. He doesn’t want to get trapped, worried his strength may fail as he swims and he'll get sucked down in the utter blackness and drown there, so he carefully plants one hand against the rock wall as he holds himself there, and then gets in the water as far as he dares with the current pulling at him. He hugged the log, tried to feel with his foot how far down it goes. He can’t shift the trunk, far too heavy for his weak body to lift, but he does snap off a few branches and make a stack of them at his camp. He’s carried some small ones in his pack. 

He’d also picked up a few shards of sharp rock, having hefted up the heaviest rocks that he could lift and then tossing them so they would shatter, hopefully into a useful shape. He’s got a couple splinters, and a few smooth stones too, almost flat enough to place things on, like plates. He’d only taken a couple of those to keep from creating too heavy a burden.

Aomine’s of course focusing on the things that look even halfway edible.

They try eating a couple different things Kagami had managed to scavenge. Cave mushrooms— these were from another, much more densely grown patch he’d found. A handful of soft clay from the river bed, some pieces of green moss with the dirt still clinging to the underside. 

Aomine thrusts his hands out at him, fingers clenched to grab, trembling as he forces them to hover there and wait, wait for Kagami to give, _ please share some with him— _

The clay turns out to be impossible to eat, technically edible, but neither of them can stomach swallowing it. The rest, they gobble up.

Aomine's shaking hands reach and press through the bars, fumbling on the food Kagami passes him, fingertips trembling so much that he practically can’t pick it up from his own palm to put it in his mouth. He brings each morsel to his lips, swallowing it all practically whole, gulping it down indiscriminately like he can’t taste a thing, and then thrusting his hands out again, _more, please—_

Kagami’s proudest catch is three crayfish.

While trying ineffectually to wash his dirty shirt in the pool, scrubbing it on a rock, he’d stopped to rest, and had let it settle on the banks, submerging and floating down a few inches, gently swaying in the current. He’d looked around the cave for a while, listening to the rush of the waterfall across the cavern.

When he’d next looked down, he’d noticed that a crayfish had crawled right onto his shirt. Holding perfectly still for a few moments, Kagami stared at it, watched it scuttle.

He started salivating so intensely that the underside of his tongue burned, his heart pounding hard, and then slowly, so slowly, he’d reached down into the water and taken the corner of his shirt in his grip, trying to create as few ripples as possible, _ don’t scare it away— _

Then he’d frantically bunched up his shirt. Not the best idea. The crayfish had almost escaped through a gap, whether it had tried to swim out or whether Kagami had almost pushed it out himself in his panic, he’ll never know— What he did know was that frantic or not, he’d still just managed to smush it in the fabric before it could zip out.

Not quite knowing what to do next, but feeling he didn’t have more than a second to think of something before- before his opportunity was wasted and it somehow escaped— Kagami slung it onto shore and scrambled for a rock.

He dragged the sopping bundle onto flat ground and unwrapped it, blindly bashing the rock down. He hits the crayfish on the back with the rock, one heavy blow, and it stops wriggling. There’s a moment where he holds his breath, holding the rock aloft and waiting, but… he’s done it. He got one!

He kneels there panting, feeling a sense of relief and triumph. He’d actually caught something with meat on it. Less than a mouthful, but even so. He’d proved to himself that he _can_ _actually do it—_

The rest of his efforts aren’t as successful. He tries to shoo some of them to shore, where they’ll be easier to scoop up, but after an hour or so of trying, he only gets two more and some sore pinched fingertips.

When Aomine sees them, his face lights up. “Hey, look at that! Great catch, big guy,” he teases, grin stretching to his ears. Kagami tries not to smile, but he can’t help it. “You’re a proper wild man.”

Aomine grips the bars, goggling down at them. There’s three. Kagami brings them close where he can take them. He pinches one between his thumb and forefinger, and Aomine reaches out with a trembling hand for it. When he’s got it, he pulls it quickly through the bars.

He hurriedly picks it apart and eats the raw inside. Kagami ignores the way that his eyes look almost watery.

Aomine gulps it down and clenches his hands a few times, shifting. He doesn’t say anything, but the way he keeps looking, Kagami knows what he’s thinking. There were only three. You can’t divide three evenly between two people. 

Kagami hadn’t found enough that he’d been able to fill his stomach, but going on who’s hungriest at the moment, there’s no contest. 

He picks up a crayfish and hums in his best impression of nonchalance, “Hey, show me how you did that.”

He doesn’t think Aomine’s fooled, but it doesn’t matter.

Aomine takes the last one and shows him how to pinch and twist the head. Kagami copies him. It cracks unpleasantly under his squeezing fingertips, and he has to pull quite a few times to get the head to separate, a string of flesh clinging on. They throw that bit aside, then pluck off the legs, and then peel the shell off around the tail. He copies Aomine as he removes a dark vein from the underside.

Kagami hesitantly puts the rest in his mouth when Aomine does. He eats the little curly bit of tail meat. It squishes in his mouth, a weird texture to bite into, and it tastes sort of like shrimp, fishy and raw— but nothing can dampen his feeling of success. The little shining pinprick of hope that he needs to keep going.

He gives Aomine mushrooms through the bars until they’re all eaten up— _ one for you, one for me, one for you, one for— _and when they’re done, they talk.

“If you can make a net, you can catch more probably,” Aomine notes, looking over the rocks and bent sticks, obviously not meant for eating.

He’s holding his belly, already gurgling as it squeezes and quakes, trying to glug down the first thing it’s had to digest for days and days. 

“There’s fish down here too.” 

“Yeah, you said. Where.”

Kagami squints. “The… water?”

“Yeah smart guy, I know, I mean what kinda' water—” Aomine rolls his eyes, making Kagami feel pretty dumb. He scowls. He hates being made to feel dumb. “Shallow, deep, is there a current…?”

“Oh. Uh…” Kagami scratched his head, one eye squinted shut. He feels itchy and sore after sleeping on the ground. Maybe he’s got fleas. Do caves have fleas? “I saw some in the waterfall pool. I haven’t swum out in there, but I think it might be deeper than my head, so pretty deep there and… I dunno’... I’d say it’s a strong current?” He thinks for a second more and then recalls, “And there’s another shallow area that I saw some smaller fish. I think it’s to my calves there.”

“Perfect, that’s perfect,” Aomine chatters, looking eager. The light of hope is starting to shine in his eyes, his belly giving a loud queasy gurgle. He looks almost deranged with excitement.

Kagami doesn’t know how it’s so perfect, seeing as he can’t catch a fish whether the water’s deep or shallow, black or blue, quick or sluggish. 

“Oh hey, and you found wood. Gimme’ that.”

Kagami hands him a stick, practically a twig, and the sharp rock. He sits and watches him fuck around with it. He looks like he’s trying to chop at it, but his hands are unsteady, so it takes him some time to shakily hack at it and whittle it to a point.

It’s some time before it clicks in his head, his deprived brain not catching on until Aomine’s basically done. He’s made a tiny spear, and Kagami suddenly realizes what he’s thinking.

He’d been going in a completely different direction. His own idea had been to dry out the twigs and maybe attempt to use them as firewood, but at the prospect of fishing with a spear, he’s filled with a curious excitement. Well, as excited as he can get when he’s this tired and hungry, and honestly, _ put out _from failed fishing attempts.

Aomine’s idea for the sticks seems much more useful, and will meet their more urgent needs. Kagami’s vague idea of what hacking it in the wild is like involves building some sort of campfire, but perhaps they don’t need that, because there’s no risk of freezing in the night, or a need to scare animals away from their camp, since they’re not out in the open woods— What they do need is another immediate source of food. 

If he can go back and break off a stick that’s big and straight enough, then sharpen it to a point, he can try to pierce a fish on the end. 

He swallows unsteadily. Kagami’s big for his age, and he’s known for his hot temper. He’s been known to get into fights, but cruelty’s not in him. He’s never killed anything larger than an insect with his bare hands. Hunting season is carried out on horseback with a pack of dogs, and fun as it was, exciting days out with his peers, Kagami never did like watching the kill. He’s not sure he can go through with… _ stabbing _ an animal like that. Of course, fish aren’t such an unusual thing to eat, but Kagami’s never even had to cut into a raw chicken breast, let alone pierced the flesh of a living creature.  
  
He supposes the fear of starving will make him do a lot of things he would never otherwise have thought himself capable of.

“You know how to catch fish like this?”

When he doesn’t answer, Aomine pantomimes spearing a fish with his skewer. Kagami snaps out of it and shakes his head.

Aomine must know how. He seems so at ease with the idea. 

It makes sense. Kagami’s probably one of the few people who doesn't, having come from a village which relied on farming and hunting and fishing skills to supplement a family’s meals. In a way, until now, he’d been incredibly lucky for the life he’d led. Not so much now.

If Aomine thinks he’s silly, or less than a man, he doesn’t show it. “Have you seen people do it?” 

He has. “When I was a kid.” It feels like a long time ago, but he remembers. His mouth waters just thinking about it.

“Salmon.” 

The logging river that lets from the mountainside down to the lakebed and on to the ocean, red and silver with thousands of sleek hook-mouthed fish leaping and struggling upstream. Men and boys roll up their pantlegs and stand in the rushing rapids, throw their hand or their spear into the water, and pull up a humongous thrashing fish. Kagami can remember watching and feeling so jealous, wanting to go play in the shallows, leap across the rocks and pull up a fish. He and his brother would pretend to be bears, pretend to bite a fish in their mouth—

“Have you done it?” Kagami wonders. Aomine grins and winks. Kagami pulls back like he’d been smacked on the nose, blinking and flustered.

“Yeah,” Aomine teases. “All poor boys know how to eat from the woods.” 

He grins wider. Kagami’s belly aches with hunger, his meagre scraps not proving enough. “It’ll be harder with smaller fish,” Aomine says, “But you can get it.”

“I have to.”

Aomine’s smile falters for a second, but he falls right back into his friendly teasing. “Don’t worry, you can learn, stud.” He flashes his teeth. “Bring home the bacon.”

Kagami sighs through his nose, long and huffy. He chews his tongue. Shakes his head. He can’t figure this guy out. Such a weird way to pick on him. Kagami wonders if Aomine _knows__._ Maybe he knows why Kagami got sent here. Or maybe he was sent here for something similar. It feels like too much of a coincidence sometimes. Why not tease him by calling him dummy or cocksucker or saying he’ll fuck him up if he doesn’t stop moping. Why wink and look him up and down and act so silly.

Aomine’s a weird one, that’s for sure. Cruel and distant one moment, criminally flirtatious the next. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever understand.

“Okay.” _ Whatever— _He’ll have to give it another try. He knows that landing a fish, even just one, is their best chance at getting something substantial in their stomachs.

Aomine advises him on how best to try to catch some fish, basically telling him all the things that Kagami had seen the men in the river doing a lifetime ago, but he puts a name to what he’d seen, explains it more logically.

Stand in the water with his pants rolled up, face the direction that the fish are coming from. If he can, try to stand on two rocks and stab the fish when they swim between his feet. Don’t hesitate, and strike true, but also don’t jump the gun and scare them unnecessarily. 

“Wait for them to come to you,” Aomine had said. Smirks crookedly, because he can’t ever stop. Because everything is always an innuendo.

“You know how to do that, huh?” he teases.  
  


Kagami told him to give it a fucking rest for once, _j__esus— _

  
  


Kagami doesn’t have any luck the first day, or the second. He’ll only try for so long, because time is precious, and he doesn’t want to burn too much of it in fruitless efforts for fish when he could be spending it foraging in the tunnels for mushrooms, which are more reliable for the moment.

By the third day, he almost gets one, his crude spear striking one in the side and bouncing off harmlessly, burying itself in the mud. 

He visits Aomine nightly to bring him water and the little food he can gather— and to talk, keep their morale up. He’s found a fairly large patch of mushrooms that should last them a little while if they limit themselves to about a handful per day. He’s also gotten much better catching crayfish. He can get almost eight or nine now on a good day, and he keeps improving as he practices, as he starts to fear the pinches less and less.

When he returns to Aomine and slings his pack on the ground, no luck again with becoming a fisherman, Aomine starts to laugh. Kagami’s disgruntled expression goes stormy.

“You’re stabbing way too hard, stud.” Kagami looks down. “It went completely blunt,” Aomine cackles. 

Kagami scowls. He’d gotten frustrated. 

He hasn’t had another temper tantrum since the first few nights spent trapped in here, maybe having worked through some of the denial. He can’t deny that the aggression is starting to build up, leaving him bad-tempered and even quicker to snap. Being constantly hungry sure doesn’t help either. It’s a bones-deep hunger. He can’t focus on anything else. It’s always on his mind, every goddamn second—   
  
Fuck, he needs to beat off when he gets a minute.

Kagami nudges the spear closer when Aomine starts reaching through the bars for it, lets him scrape at it with a rock to sharpen it again. His lazy carefree prattling has served to put him at ease for the last few nights, but today Kagami sits with tense shoulders, eyes drawn to the way Aomine’s hands shake. 

He’s always shaking, always—

His limbs are so long, probably having been lean with muscle at one time, but they’re so thin and bony now. His hands are all knuckles and tendons, the skin stretched tight.

Aomine tires quickly, barely any energy. He passes it off as being sleepy. Kagami doesn’t say anything as he takes the stick back. Aomine eases himself over to lean on his other hip.

Kagami sits with Aomine and sharpens his fishing spear to a large point. Aomine sits up at the bars and watches him, talks occasionally. He seems to be prodding him for conversation the first couple of times, but when he doesn’t get more than grunts in response, he just hums aimlessly about nonsense, talks at him until Kagami’s mood passes. It usually does after an hour or so in Aomine’s company. Being alone all day hasn’t been good for him.

He could use a break, that’s for sure. Some good news. Anything to lift his spirits.

Aomine eventually shifts and squeezes himself down on his front with his legs kicked up behind him, heels on his butt. His hands are outside the bars. He fiddles with some rock and stick scraps and some bits of string he’s pulled from the hem of his pants. 

He lays there, meticulously tying sticks together, delicate work from surprisingly dexterous fingertips, however tremulous. A tiny sword made of two twigs. A little horse that stands on its own four twig legs— or maybe it’s a dog.

Kagami’s sure that there’s a way out of this cave. He tells Aomine so. 

Whenever they talk in the evenings, Kagami always talks about _ once you’re out— _completely natural about it even though they both know the facts. There’s no key to Aomine’s cage and the bars are too thick to break.

But he says it anyway. Bull-headed and completely certain he’ll make the impossible work to his advantage, work in his favor, a boy who is positive he’ll get his way in the end because he’s always gotten his way in life until now, whether through determination or sheer luck of circumstance.

_ Once you’re out, we’ll do this and that— You can help me such and such— _

Aomine’s played along for the moment, but it must be hard, being stuck in there, soiling himself and starving slowly, sitting alone for hours on end in silence and blackness while Kagami’s at liberty to disappear, walk where he pleases.

To him, perhaps Kagami’s words are perceived as cruelty and not kindness. It still doesn’t quite occur to Kagami that each time, he’s grinding away at Aomine’s good graces, that in trying to give him some hope, something to look forward to, the same confidence that he carries with him, he’s really just making Aomine more and more bitter with his situation.

“Once you’re out we can try to swim under the cave wall a ways, see if it leads outside.” A terrifying prospect alone, but if they can tie a rope around their belly, the other can pull them back. 

“It has to,” Kagami says to himself. The longer he spends down here, the more certain he is that there’s an exit somewhere. Especially when he’s in the waterfall cavern, he can smell the difference in air quality. Not as stagnant and musty as the narrower tunnels. Almost fresh, like it’s seeping in from the outside. The water too, that has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it.

“It must lead outside, I don’t know where else that tree could’ve come from,” he rambles. “It’s not like it grew down here—”

“Don’t get your hopes up.” Aomine’s tone is kind of flat. He always gets sour when Kagami talks about getting out.

Kagami doesn’t like to think too hard about how every time he tries to encourage Aomine and make him believe that they’re not going to die here, Aomine is just humoring him, and has just been contenting himself to spending his last days with Kagami, letting Kagami believe that there was still hope and come to terms with it on his own time. Kagami can’t let himself think like that, such a hopeless existence, waiting out their last days until death takes them. It makes him furious and heartbroken enough with the unfairness of it all that he thinks he could sob—

“We can try,” he insists, watching Aomine warily. “I know there’s a way out.”

Aomine looks at him from under hooded eyes, dubious, like an annoyed parent listening to their child’s account of the monster in their room, attentive but skeptical.

“You know, huh.”

“Yeah.” Aomine doesn’t roll his eyes, but his grimace says it for him.  
  


Sometimes, Kagami thinks if he weren’t in that goddamn cage, he’d reach out and shake Aomine back and forth by the shoulders until his stupid face turned blue.

  
  
  


Not long after, Kagami catches his first fish. It’s sizeable too. Longer than his hand, and _ fat— _  
  


He’d punched a haphazard hole through its left side, and when he realized it had gotten stuck to the riverbed instead of darting away like all the others, he dislodged it, pulling it up in shock and gaping, almost not knowing what’s happened after so many failed attempts. He stares at it, mouth open, watching it flop back and forth on the end of the stick, flipping its tail, until it almost dislodges itself.

That snaps him out of it, and he quickly moves it away from the water, so that if it falls, it won’t plunge back into the river and evade him again. Adrenaline shoots through him like fire, joy and excitement—

Heart fluttering in his mouth, he tries to grab it in his hand to still its struggles, but its flipping increases, wild flailing, and he kind of freaks out. 

He’s still so surprised that he’d actually got it that he loses his common sense. All that’s on his mind is that he did it, they’re gonna’ eat, holy shit, he did it— He doesn’t stay to attempt another catch, he just splashes out of the water with it before it can leap away, disappear, before he can wake up from this hallucination, this dream— he gathers his stuff in a flash and practically runs the distance back to Aomine to show him.

“I got one!” he calls as he barrels out of the tunnel.

Aomine’s quiet for a beat, looks out at him, and then clenches his fists. “Woo!” he crows with him, grabbing the bars, an energy shooting into his feeble body, rocketing him around in his confines. 

The success is just what his heavy heart had sorely needed. He feels like himself for what must be the first time in so, so long. He actually feels happy.

Kagami lumbers over in a hurry and lays the fish down on a flat stone, panting and grinning from ear to ear. Aomine looks excited too, gazing down at the fish with big eyes. It’s still twitching and squirming, gasping occasionally.

Clenching and unclenching his fists on his thighs, his wet shins covered in dust and gravel, Kagami looks eagerly into Aomine’s face. “How… how do we eat it?” Practically wriggling, he blurts, “I can try to make a fire now.” 

“That’ll take too long,” Aomine says, raspy and almost… lusty somehow? Kagami’s smile fades. His mouth is wet with saliva, literally dripping with it.

“Let’s eat it now.” Kagami can’t suppress a shudder, the hairs standing up on his neck. He sounds… _ insane. _

Kagami holds onto the fish, which gasps, a frantic little cold pulse, its slippery sticky body thrashing in its death throes. He swallows hard.

“Give it to me.”

Aomine has this look on his face that Kagami can’t stop staring at. The look of a man gone mad. Kagami feels cold and clammy all over.

Is he about to watch Aomine tear into it with his teeth, bite it at the neck and rip its head, crunch it up bones and scales and brain and eyes and all? Is he— 

“Kagami, give it to me.” 

His neck prickles, but he hesitantly lets Aomine take it. He watches as Aomine places it on the ground in front of him and lays his palm on the fish’s gasping belly to hold it still.

Kagami nearly yelps aloud but manages to contain his surprise to a muffled gasp— Aomine picks up a fist-sized rock and slams it into the fish’s head, a vicious _ crack— _

It abruptly lays still. Kagami’s heart pounds as Aomine brings its limp body through the bars and gets to work immediately cutting it with a sharp rock. It’s not like he didn’t know they would have to kill it and slice it up, but it’s the look on his face, it’s putting him on edge. He looked positively unhinged for a moment there.

Aomine uses two rocks to help him work. He lines the fish’s fins up on a sharp rock beneath it, and uses another rock to pound from above, snapping its fins down onto the sharp edge to slice and whack them off.

He cuts the fins off on its sides, on the head, and the tail. He doesn’t seem as frenzied now, moving more slowly and carefully, his shaking hands working meticulously. 

Kagami watches closely, still a little uneasy, his excitement burning out somewhat at the disturbing and oddly fascinating sight. If he detaches himself from their desperate situation, from Aomine’s wild look, he can pretend they’re out on the docks back home, can pretend they’re camping and playing that they're living off the land— 

Aomine pinches the fish’s head between two long monkey toes to hold it still. It’s upside down, poised so he can use the sharp rock to stab the tip into a little hole on the fish’s bottom side. He crudely slices and tears it down the belly and up towards the head. 

Blood and juice is gushing out over Aomine’s hands. The smell is making Kagami resist gagging. Aomine seems unphased, and alarmingly practiced at this kind of thing. Kagami supposes that makes sense. He’s just been raised soft and spoiled. Of course anyone else would be used to it.

Aomine drags the rock up sharply, yanking the cut through into the gills. He stabs into the gills on either side, crudely slicing and stabbing until the head starts to come loose. He twists and twists it until the spine and bones crack and separate and he can pluck it apart.

He reaches into the cut without hesitation and pries the fish’s body apart, sticks his hand into its belly fearlessly and opens it up. Kagami wonders if it’s warm on the inside. Aomine scoops out a yellow and green and grey mass of slimy mushy guts that sit just below the fish’s neck, throwing them out to the side.

He pokes the smelly dead fish head out through the bars. The eye looks at Kagami. Kagami looks into the eye.

“We can roast that and pick off it if we ever get a fire going,” Aomine says, breathless, sounding ravenous and excited. Kagami’s silent. 

“Gimme’ that flat rock. And that one.”

Kagami gives him their plate rocks and another one that he’d found that was smaller, the kind he’d skipped with on the pond behind the family home when he was a kid, flat and smooth.

Aomine digs it into the side of the fish, presses in so hard that the meat squishes onto the plate rock, wet with juice. He drags it backwards, scrubbing it back and forth, and Kagami watches as scales start to splinter and scatter, sticking to Aomine’s feet.

“I was supposed to do this first,” he curses quietly. The loose cut-up body of the fish moves and slides around under his efforts.

They don’t have water to wash it with, so Aomine uses his palm to smooth down the fish and wipe the scales off. The inside is pink, looks like Kagami expects raw meat to look. It’s probably one of the more appetizing things he’s had to choke down since coming here.

When Aomine slices it in two down the center and cuts off the ridge of its back and pulls the bones out, it doesn’t look so big anymore. There’s not as much meat as he’d thought when he caught it.

Kagami sits and waits. He doesn’t know what else he’d expected Aomine to do, but he felt a little surprised when Aomine put part of the fish out of the bars and then sits there in a pile of scales and fish guts, keeping half for himself. That must be it, because Aomine brings the raw pink meat to his mouth and takes a big mouthful.

He sits a second and watches him chew and smack his lips on it, then hesitantly brings his own to his face. He wipes some scales and flecks of dirt off with his hand, and then opens up. The smell is powerful— He has to plug his nose before he bites in.

There are some scales in his mouth. They crunch and stick in his teeth, rough and papery, like splinters of bone. The raw meat squishes on his tongue, wet and slippery and slimy, with a strong fishy aftertaste. He manages to swallow the mouthful, then tears off another piece on his teeth and swallows that down too. It almost comes back up. He doesn’t know if he can keep it down.

Aomine’s already almost picked his clean. He’s been starving even longer than Kagami, so long in fact that it looks like he can’t handle food in any significant quantity. He sits and holds his belly. He heaves over and over, body rejecting the meat. The noise makes Kagami’s own nausea pick up. 

Aomine throws up in his mouth over and over but he plugs his nose and holds his mouth shut, making himself swallow it again several dozen times, forces himself to digest it.

He lays there and pants while Kagami tries to eat the rest of his without chewing, without tasting. It’s easier than it should be. He doesn’t know what that says about how bad their situation has become.

The scales sticking to Aomine’s arms and hands glitter and gleam in the dim light. He looks oddly peaceful, lying there so still.

When he stops trying to throw up, he seems content, holding his stomach in relief, rubbing it when it gurgles quietly. He looks so much better for a half-decent meal. Kagami feels a little better now too. He thinks he can get used to the texture in time. The taste hadn’t bothered him as much as expected.

“It actually tasted alright,” Aomine notes, cautiously letting a burp slip. He hiccups and gulps, but keeps it down. “And I got to taste it a lot— Like, five, ten times,” he jokes breathlessly. Kagami quirks his lip.

“We can cook the next ones,” Aomine says, conciliatory, settling on his side and cupping his stomach in his hand, still flat and sunken, but appeased for now. 

“The next ones,” Kagami murmurs, dazed, then shakes himself. 

It’s still early in the day, so Kagami resolves to go get more. Electrified by a successful attempt, at long last, he goes back to the grind with a renewed determination. 

He takes the head and the guts to a dark tunnel, one he doesn’t plan to walk down, and throws them as far as he can into the darkness. He has to stop to try not to vomit when his stomach rebels, raw fish sloshing around inside him, but the queasy feeling goes away soon. 

After an hour or so trying to nab another fish, Kagami wades into the pool and breaks off some larger branches, able to shift the log back and forth and drag it a little ways. Maybe if he gets his strength up he’ll be able to heave it up. He takes what he can carry back to Aomine to dry out. 

“Where’d you learn to do that.”

Aomine looks up.

“With the fish,” Kagami clarifies. Now that the uncomfortable disturbed moment has passed, Kagami rather admires that he’d known what to do like that, gone at it like it was what he did every day, like it was his usual lunch at home. 

“Oh. My dad taught me,” Aomine says after blinking. “... He was a fisherman.” 

Kagami hums and lets it drop. He thinks of home. The pine forest he’d gone on hunts in during the fall. The fishing village. Home seems so very, very far away.

“What was your family?” Kagami looks up. Aomine’s eyes are a night sky, unclouded and glittering with stars.

He pauses, hesitates for a long moment. “Landholders.”

Aomine face falls, settling into something surprised. No, not quite surprised. Expectant, actually. Resigned, yet disappointed. And bitter— so fucking bitter. The transformation is so sudden it’s amazing.

Kagami’s silent, teeth clenched together, stomach tight as he waits.

“You _ are _from those Kagamis.” He says it like he’d suspected all along, but had let himself hope that it was a mistake. 

“...” Aomine knows them. Of course he does. It explains why he’d remembered his name so easily in the beginning. Kagami swallows uncomfortably.

“I knew they had a kid.” His voice is sharp and sarcastic now, a smile lacing it, but it's not a good smile. It reminds him of the first time they talked. Aomine, words thick with thorns and hostility, his expression and his demeanor so incredibly cruel. 

It puts Kagami on edge even worse than it had then. Because for a few days, he’d let himself believe that starving together, suffering together had somehow made them friends, had somehow made Aomine trustworthy. It’s a harsh reminder that the feeling that they knew each other in some special way, that they weren’t strangers, that’s all a fucking mirage. 

“How’d the family’s shining heir end himself up in here, I wonder.” Kagami ground his teeth back and forth listening to that tone, low and lazy, a sarcastic croon meant to bite and wound. 

“The way I see it, rich boys can get away with anything they want.” His voice is soft and deceptively mellow, but his eyes are so fucking cold, drilling into Kagami, daring him to meet their stare.

He’s looking at Kagami like he’s a whole different person. Like he’s someone that he’d thought he knew, but doesn’t trust or respect or like anymore, not now that he knows. Like he’s no longer the boy he’s teased and flirted with and gone through the ups and the many devastating downs with, starved with and patiently waited for each day. Like the boy he must have trusted enough to drop this cruel facade in front of and show his belly, eat and drink out of his hand, rely on him, like that boy never existed.

Or was that teasing smiling grin the facade all along, and was this the true Aomine. 

Vicious and mean, taking a spiteful satisfaction in trying to hurt Kagami, jab him where he’s weak. Maybe this had been him all along, and the person he’d thought he knew was just an act all along, a mask with the purpose of staying on Kagami’s good side.

“Not anything,” Kagami says, his voice sounding hollow in his own ears, because for a second, he thinks that must be what Aomine’s getting at. He must know. Or at least suspect.

Aomine shuts up for a second. Lets out a breathless laugh, flat and humorless.

“Are you kidding me?” he demands, and Kagami won’t meet his eyes, just focuses on cooling his simmering temper, the pain building beneath the ferocious wound only just closed.

“Your dad really put you here, no shit?” Aomine scoffs in disbelief. “I knew that type was cold, but that’s somethin’ else.”

_ ‘He didn’t have a choice—’ _ Kagami wants to say, anger and sorrow bubbling inside of him.

Because he feels let down. Part of him feels betrayed that his father hadn’t tried harder for him. He knows that he’d tried his hardest, but that hadn’t been good enough, and now he’s here—

Kagami wishes he could see him again.

“What could you have possibly done?” Aomine demands, his voice echoing at Kagami’s back as he stands and turns, clenching his fists. 

“It musta’ been really bad.”

It’s one jab too many, and Kagami snaps, “Whatever it was, at least it wasn’t bad enough to lock me up too.”

Aomine’s mean smirk drops in an instant, and Kagami’s sadistically pleased for one solitary second that he’d hurt him back. 

He watches as Aomine swallows and then glares. Kagami wants to take it back then, but he keeps scowling, teeth clenched together.

“Fuck you then,” he growls out, dark and murderous, and it sparks rage in Kagami like nothing else. He flips Aomine off and pushes away from him, walks off.

“Fuck you, Kagami!” he screams after him, rattling the bars and cursing him up and down, rich kid piece of shit, he didn’t know what it was like, never had to suffer a day in his life until now, had no right to look down on him like he was dirt— 

“Yeah, _ piss off!” _Aomine hollers, his screams almost inhuman with rage, ricocheting through the cave, battering Kagami with his fury from all sides. “Fuck right off and don’t come back!” It echoes at Kagami’s back, and Kagami does. He storms off and leaves him there.

Kagami spends the rest of the day in a rotten mood, equal parts guilty and boiling mad. He tries to catch some food but comes up with nothing but an achy back and an inflamed temper, infuriated and exhausted.

He thinks of sleeping in the moss cavern under the stars, leaving Aomine there alone, but the guilt is too much, and after a few hours to cool off, Kagami at last comes back late in the night.

He finds Aomine slumped to the ground against the bars, hands around them, collapsed in a heap, fast asleep. He wonders if Aomine had been calling for him and feels his throat tighten up.

Tiptoeing up, Kagami sits down next to him. “Aomine,” he murmurs.

Aomine doesn’t open his eyes. He cringes, face scrunching. Then he curls against the side of the cage, arms through the bars, trying to scoot as close as he can. He tries to budge his head up to the bars, as if he can get close enough to rest it on Kagami’s lap, pillow his head on his leg. 

Kagami swallows hard at the sight of his dark hair there on the ground, poking through the bars, pitiful pinched face pressing into the metal. He puts a hand through and lays it on his cheek, pets it once. 

He places it on his hair, stiff and bristly, sticky and unwashed. He looks so vulnerable like this, eyes shut, brow scrunched, curled up like a sack of bones. He seems so helpless, head cupped in Kagami’s palm.  
  


Kagami sits with him until he succumbs to exhaustion, laying down to fall asleep, bars digging into his knees, Aomine’s forehead brushing his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I haven't responded to comments this week, I've been working like a madman, packing up to go back to university and working on the outline for my next fic. Please know they're really appreciated and I reread them again and again, thank you guys. ♥


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My new outline is done, time to start writing.
> 
> First day of the sem is tomorrow, good luck to everyone who's back to school ♥

When Kagami wakes, he’s laying on his side. He’d slept deeply, must not have even shifted or rolled over, because his joints are sore. His vision has big parallel slices cut out of it— 

Bars.

He’s laying next to the cage, hand through the slats, and Aomine has rolled himself against the barred wall, smushing himself into it. Scrunched up as close to him as possible. His eyes are shut. 

Thoughts of last night flit through his mind as he comes back to reality, uncomfortable flickers of guilt and shame. He wishes he could take some of it back. Alright, maybe all of it— 

When Kagami sits up, there’s a crick in his back that he twists and squirms to try and correct. He ruffles fish scales out of his hair, tries to wipe them from his arms, but they stick stubbornly. 

He pees behind a rock in the corner and then starts his day. Time to find food, yet again.

He looks back. Aomine’s still sleeping. He doesn’t want to wake him. He looks exhausted. Even so, Kagami feels weird about leaving without saying anything, especially since they’d parted pretty badly last night. He doesn’t want Aomine to wake up and think that Kagami’s abandoned him. Even though he’d been really mad, he wouldn’t leave Aomine to die.

After some contemplation, Kagami arranges some twigs into a crude message, _ back soon— _and then arranges some scales into a fish shape. He considers making a dick instead but figures, nah…

Satisfied that if Aomine wakes before he gets back, he won’t think Kagami’s still pissed and that he’s left him to die alone, Kagami heads down the tunnel. 

Honestly, he’s feeling pretty rough today. He’s hungry, but not as bad as it’s been, after last night’s meal. Everything else sucks though.

His feet are achy from walking on the gritty cave floor barefoot for days, the soles tough and dirty. His mouth is thick and coated in a disgusting layer of foul slime, reeking of fish breath— and his head is _ pounding. _It’s like a mallet is driving a stake into his brain with each pulse of blood. It feels like it’s somewhere inbetween his ears, right in the center of his head. He better take a long drink of water. 

He does, and it helps to quell his queasy stomach a little too. He knows it’s impossible, knows it’s all in his head, but he thinks he can still feel the sensation of the fish sitting whole in his gut, still solid and sloshing around.

As he forages, at a certain point he just checks out mentally, body working automatically, a mindless hum as he goes through the motions. All the aimless thoughts that normally buzz through kind of go away, leaving him with a very singular focus. It actually helps a lot— It’s a pretty successful day. His best yet, in fact.

“You’re back,” Aomine calls. He looks surprised to see him, and a little wary. Kagami grunts in return and slings down the pack he’d made with his shirt.

“Whoa, you’ve got a haul this time.”

“...” Kagami doesn’t feel like talking. He wishes he could get some more sleep. He’s not cranky exactly, but he’s feeling really wiped out. His silence seems to be putting Aomine on edge, because he keeps giving Kagami these furtive glances. 

Maybe he thinks he’s still mad at him. Now that he’s thinking about it, it’s the first time Aomine hasn’t greeted him with some stupid pet name— 

“Last night,” he finally notes, hesitant and low. “You came back.” Kagami looks up. 

So he does remember then. He _ had _ been awake. Hadn’t just scooted up to the bars in his sleep.

Aomine’s looking at him like he’d had himself half-convinced until now that the whole thing had been a dream or some sort of hallucination. Like he’d been pretty damn sure that whatever truce they’d had going had gotten fucked and he was gonna’ be on his own from now on. He hadn’t expected Kagami to come back. 

Waking up on his own probably hadn’t helped him confirm one way or another if it was real. 

“Why’d you leave without saying anything,” Aomine finally wonders, when Kagami doesn’t deign to respond. 

“Did not,” he finally mutters, giving him a look and nodding his head towards his stick message. Aomine wrinkles his nose. Offers him the first smile of the day.

“Kagami, I can’t fuckin’ read,” he snorts, like he’s adorable to even assume. As if to say, why _ would _ he be able to read. 

“Nice fish though. Kinda’ looks like a dick if you squint—”

“Oh,” Kagami mumbles. He hadn’t thought of that. He doesn’t know why he’d assumed, but it comes as a shock. How can he not read? Hadn’t he gone to school as a little boy? Maybe his family hadn’t had the money. Maybe they’d needed him at home more.

“Well how was I supposed to know,” he muttered defensively, coming out of the fog enough to give Aomine a half-assed glare.

“Yeah yeah, little prince,” Aomine hums sarcastically, eyebrows raised, the smirk on his lips telling him he’s only teasing this time, maybe trying to cheer him up a little— 

“Show me whatcha’ got.”

Kagami perks up somewhat, because his labors had paid off for once. After many hours of struggling and repeatedly trudging back to shore when he was exhausted enough to give up, and then turning back again when he decided, _ no, maybe he’ll try just a little longer— _

He wanted something to bring back as a peace offering, an apology of sorts, and he’s got a good one.

He’d caught four this time— four fish, that is. 

One was really big, significantly bigger than the others. It was a different kind, he can tell because its color is different and it has these spines that the others don’t have. Aomine grins when he sees them. He looks up at Kagami, still grinning.

Kagami smiles back, shoulders stiffening as he feels a swell of pride. He feels a little more like himself.

“Leave those to me,” Aomine says with a cheeky grin. “Let’s try an’ roast these puppies. You’re on grill duty, hot stuff.” 

Kagami doesn’t even bother pretending to be annoyed anymore. He’s too relieved.

Aomine sets up a big rock that’s got a raised edge to it, almost a wedge shape, and lays the fish against it in different positions, using another rock to hit against the fish’s fins and tail, chopping them against the sharp rock beneath. The cut fins gather beneath in a little pile. Aomine’s so quick and practiced about it, it only takes him a couple whacks on each side and he’s moving on to the next one in a blur. 

He breezes through descaling and cutting their fish while he instructs Kagami on making a little firepit. Kagami follows his directions somewhat cluelessly, fumbling around and looking up for approval frequently after each step.

He gathers a pile of medium sized rocks and arranges them into a circle, assembling a ring of stones a little ways from the cage. It’s centered under one of the larger cracks in the ceiling. As Aomine explains it, this is a precaution so that they don’t asphyxiate on trapped smoke.

After that he makes a little cone of twigs, standing them up and leaning them onto each other, building it larger and larger. To Kagami, it looks kind of like a miniature tent, just without the animal skin cover.

Aomine’s got all the fish gutted and beheaded and descaled, and their stomachs are both growling, but they’re both still resolved to try to get a fire going and cook them this time. Aomine insists that they ought to celebrate Kagami’s hard work, even if they don’t really _ need _ the fire.

Kagami’s excited. He’s never lit a fire before. He doesn’t actually know how it’s done. Every morning, the fireplace in his room at the foot of his bed is just lit, as though by magic, prepared for his comfort by servants. He’s been eager to fit some picture of what he imagined hacking it in the wilderness was, lighting a fire from scratch like a real man, but now that he thinks on it, he doesn’t have an idea how. He thinks he remembers something about flint—

Aomine definitely knows, because there’s an ease with which he goes about the next part, as if he’s done this dozens of times, no big deal, nothing special— Kagami feels a fierce admiration as he watches him work, privately impressed.

He requests a couple different sharp stones, and tests them by hitting them together. By some unknown criteria, he discards several after only a couple tries. Others, he scrapes and strikes together over and over, fruitlessly trying for a spark.

“Shit,” he curses after some time, wiping his forehead with his wrist and breathing heavily from exertion.

Kagami’s shoulders slump, unsuccessful in hiding his disappointment, but apparently Aomine isn’t beat yet, because he just shakes himself and says, “Okay. New plan. Gimme’ that flat piece of wood.”

Kagami startles, and then fumbles to get up and grab it, handing it to him through the gaps and crouching close. Aomine doesn’t tell him to fuck off and quit breathing in his face, so he squats at the bars and peers in, watching what he’s doing with fascination. 

He sits in rapt attention, feeling sort of out of place, not knowing what else to do to help since Aomine isn’t telling him anything. He’s just working quietly on his own, focusing hard. 

Kagami watches him pull and pick at his pants and shirt until he has a ball of string and fuzz, which he sets aside by his foot. He asks Kagami to give him a piece of the frayed rope too, and picks off a strand of twine, unraveling it. Going for the wood next, Aomine picks it up and digs his short nails in, pulling and prying at it until it starts to split and snap apart. He lays down a flat splintery piece on the floor of the cage, bark face-down. 

He fumbles to tie the twine around his hands, one loop for each thumb. Kagami’s intensely confused on what this has to do with lighting a fire, but keeps his mouth shut. 

Then he takes a thin straight stick, marginally sturdy, and places it upright on the flat piece of wood. He cuts a knotch into the top with a sharp stone, and fits the middle of the twine into the knotch. He worms both his big toes onto the corners of the flat piece to hold it still, closes his palms together around the stick, and then rolls them back and forth as fast as he can, spinning the stick. The string loops on his thumbs keep his hands from sliding down.

Kagami watches cluelessly until Aomine stops to take a break and feels at the spot he’s drilled in. He lets Kagami feel too. He’s surprised to feel that it’s pretty hot— “Whoa…”

Aomine goes back to driving the two pieces of wood together as hard and fast as he can, creating as much friction as possible. His arms and forehead are gleaming with sweat and he’s starting to bite his lips and hold his breath to try and keep it up as long as he can. He pants and gasps between bouts, then throws himself into it even harder. 

It’s taking so long. “Shit,” Aomine curses when he fumbles it, starting to tire out. “C’mon… Damnit, c’mon.” He pants, stopping again.

“Let me,” Kagami offers.

“No, I got it.” Aomine holds his breath, biting his lips into his mouth and pushing himself hard—

To Kagami’s amazement, _ smoke— there—! _

“There,” Aomine eeps out, straining to keep it up. “Blow. Kagami, blow, quick—” Kagami starts, jolting into action. He crouches down and blows at the bottom, and sees a tiny glowing ember flare to life.

Shit, it’s actually working, holy shit—

“Not too hard— quick, catch the thread on it,” Aomine pants, starting to falter as Kagami grabs the ball of string and pokes it onto the microscopic coal, a bright orange speck that smokes and smolders. It creeps into the tangle of fuzz and starts to grow, just a little, turning the threads red and then black as they sizzle out. Every time he blows, they flare back to life and then die.

Aomine stops, panting. He sits there and heaves for breath, arms hanging limp. “Pick it up and take it to the pit— Keep blowing—” He’s winded, but sounds as hopped on adrenaline as Kagami is, his commands frantic and quick with urgency. 

“Take it to the sticks. Protect it with your hand, don’t let it go out,” he urges, leaning forward to try and look around Kagami as he picks up the glowing red ball of string, cups it in his hands, and carries it as quick as he can to the cone of sticks.

“Stuff it in there. Try to feed it a twig if you can. Keep going, it’s so close—” Kagami pokes it into the fire pit, blows and blows on it, smoke in his face. His lungs feel like they’re going to give out.

“Catch!” Aomine hollers. _ “Catch— _ Catch, you son of a shit! You bitch!” he shouts, banging his fist on a bar.

Kagami doesn’t let the spark go out, but the string ball is black and almost burnt up to ash. He touches a stick to the center, blowing for as long as he can to keep the ember orange, and a tiny little twig catches, starting to smolder.

He doesn’t know why it’s not burning. It’s taking such a long time. His heart is in his mouth for what feels like ages, watching that little spark fade over and over again every time he stops to catch his breath. He keeps poking twigs onto it and adding to it, feeding it oxygen, and it slowly, _ slowly _ starts to build.

When a flame finally pops and crackles to life, Aomine starts laughing, screeching and jumping around in excitement like a monkey in a cage. Kagami feels half-hysterical too, distrustfully eyeing the tiny fire, stunned that they’d actually done it— 

He picks at it for some time before he trusts that it won’t go out, adding sticks to it until it’s a small but steady blaze. It’s hot on his face and arms, a dry ashy heat. The fire is orange and yellow, lighting the cave ablaze, makes it glow red and brown. It lights his dirty arms up and casts huge shadows on the wall, shadows of rocks.

The light burning into his corneas, the heat on his chilly hands, it’s fucking awesome. It feels so good to have accomplished something. In such a shitty situation, it feels so meaningful, so satisfying, to have things go right for once. He wishes his dad could see this, wonders if he’d be proud—

By the time he sits back and lets himself exhale, shoulders lowering, Aomine’s got the fishes fileted and skewered on some sticks, ready to cook.

The shadow cast by the cage is a humongous shape stretching almost to the ceiling, its black silhouette so distorted beyond its reality in the flickering light that the bars look almost fluid, like Aomine could slip out of them if he wanted, like his shadow could wiggle through and come sit next to his.

Kagami takes the sticks and holds them by the fire where Aomine tells him— _ not so close to the flames, it’s not supposed to touch the fire, it’ll get all black and charred, idiot— _ He hovers the pink meat above the flames, flips them when he says. 

They start to turn white and then brown lightly on both sides, and they start to smell _ good. _ It’s the most appetizing thing he’s had to eat in ages now and his mouth is watering profusely, so much that it hurts under his tongue.

Cooked all the way through, the meat looking brown and crispy on the outside, Kagami offers a skewer to Aomine to test. When he bites in, steam pours out, and he opens his mouth to cool it, the meat having burned his tongue— 

The inside comes apart in flakes, tender and cooked through under the crispy skin. Kagami bites into his own, burning the whole inside of his mouth too. 

They sit and eat, splitting it as evenly as they can, eating fast but savoring the last few bites, nibbling on a bit of gristle. Of course, if he were at home, Kagami could keep eating until his sides split, a bottomless stomach, but what they’d cooked had satisfied his hunger. It’s the first time he’s felt like he’d gotten enough in a long time.

They sit there like that and burp back and forth for a while, full and happy.

Aomine picks his teeth with a fish bone, hand on his belly, and lets out a long sigh. The firelight makes his brown skin glow like bronze, licking at his body.

“I’m here because of my family too,” Aomine says. They’ve been watching the fire for some time, listening to it pop.

“In a way.”

Kagami’s quiet. Suddenly his appetite is gone. 

They sit and gaze at the way the light plays on the wall, long tongues of orange light pushing back the blackness and setting the cave in an almost sinister glow, shadows of boulders dancing upon the cavern walls, reaching for the ceiling above. Kagami sits with his feet stuck out towards the flames, warming the dirty soles.

He’d been hoping not to mention last night again, or even think about it if possible, but apparently Aomine isn’t going to let it drop.

Aomine’s tone is thoughtful. Maybe he thinks if he shares, they can reach a sort of truce after Kagami’s lashout before. Whatever it is, Kagami sits in silence, transfixed by the flames.

“My family owes a lot of money on our piece of land,” Aomine hums. Kagami can see him out of the corner of his eye, lounging on his side, head propped up on his hand, looking out through the bars towards the fire.

“We spent the last of our coin on trying to help my mom, but—” Kagami sees him shake his head. Aomine sighs up at the ceiling. 

Kagami swallowed.

“Come time to collect a payment on the debt, there…” He sighs through his nose and rubs at his brow. “There’s nothing left.” 

He doesn’t sound mellow anymore. He sounds more defeated than Kagami’s ever heard him.

“What happened?” he hears himself say, feels the words leave him after a long silence. 

He hears a light huff, a tired whistle of a laugh puffing out Aomine’s nose. “Collectors still cut off hands for debts where I’m from.” 

There it is again, that dark humor that Kagami will never, never understand. It’s not even a joke this time, so why is he smiling so bitterly, why is smirking like he could just laugh and laugh— 

“Did they…?” Kagami wonders when Aomine goes quiet. He leans back, settling on his elbows, looks over his shoulder at him. “Take a hand?” he clarifies.

Aomine snorts, louder this time. “They took me.”

“...” Kagami stares into the fire, unseeing. Sparks crackle and pop, spit embers out of the ring of stones next to his ankles. Smoke puffs overhead, rising straight up with no wind to direct it elsewhere. 

“Till the debt’s paid.”

He can hear Aomine stretching. A burp, a soft sigh. Some clinking as he tries to straighten his legs in a metal space too small for him. 

“_ Better hurry and get the money together before he starves up there— _ Not that they meant to make good on that promise.” So derisive. So sarcastic. Like this nightmare is someone else’s and not his own.

“That… that can’t be all.” Kagami doesn’t believe it. 

Aomine shrugs. He looks up and squints at him, feeling dazed as he shakes his head slowly. 

“Why not debtor’s prison,” he wonders. “Or forced labor.” Aomine’s smile slips off as he looks back at Kagami, eyes hooded, gaze assessing.

Kagami furrows his brow a bit more, disgruntled, because that doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t. “Why would they go out of their way to put you out here in the middle of nowhere.” At least he’d been exiled, so the location was more logical, but Aomine...

He’s thought it was weird before, such a gratuitous punishment. Pointless torture, beating a dead horse. It’s such a disproportionate response. It’s such unimaginable cruelty when Aomine claims his only crime is being too poor to pay. Something must be missing.

Aomine’s got his arms behind his head now, back to his bullshit. Back to this arrogant cocky shithead bravado that Kagami’s convinced must be a front— a way of distancing himself, coping with his situation with some semblance of grace. Has to be. 

A quirk of his lip, a leering smirk, mean and nasty. “I’m just special like that.”  
  
Kagami doesn’t smile.

“If you had the money, they’d get you out?” he mutters, but Aomine’s quiet. 

He lets the silence fall again, stares into the fire until it’s a pile of embers. He settles on his side, curling around the fire pit, head pillowed on his arm.

It must be the middle of the night by now. Aomine’s still awake, but he hasn’t said anything else.

“I miss home so much— Satsuki,” he murmurs, so quiet that it’s almost a whisper. It causes such a bitter pain in Kagami’s chest that he can’t speak, can’t swallow. 

He’s laying on his back, knees up, arm stretched out above him. He’s looking up at the cage’s ceiling through the gaps in his fingers. Kagami doesn’t know if he’s talking to him or not.

“I wish I could see her again.” 

Kagami closes his eyes tight and lays quietly for a long, long time. Tries to fall asleep to the tiny sounds of the fire crackling until it dies.

Eyes drifting open just barely, throat tight, Kagami looks at the dark shape cast by the metal cage. It seems stretched so big, and Aomine’s silhouette looks so small within it.

If he got up and went to lay by the bars next to him, the trick of the light would probably let him pretend they were sitting side by side in the cage, or both sitting outside it with the cage behind them. 

That’s the last thing he thinks before he falls asleep, heart tight with an aching sorrow—   
  


He could look at the wall and for a second, let himself believe that there was nothing to separate them but a shadow.


	5. Chapter 5

It rains for the next few days— 

Storms and storms so much that the rain must be swelling the mountain rivers, engorging them until the floodwaters spill down the cliffside. The runoff is pouring into the cave, draining through cracks in the rock.

Kagami can stand beneath the sky portal in the mossy cavern and let the spray pour over his body, spill through his hair, a steady shower that splatters against the rock beneath like a waterfall. He can stand there and stare up through the hole at the dark sky, watch the rain hurling down to meet him like pebbles, striking his eyes and cheeks and lips. He stands there and it’s almost as though he’s standing outside in the woods underneath a summer storm, and not just looking out at the world through a window.

Sometimes he wonders if the thunder will rattle the cave apart, collapse it on them. The thought doesn’t terrify him as much as it should. He’s been down here for so long that part of him thinks, _ at least it would be quick— _

The runoff from the continued squalls is so significant that the shallow waterbed in the mossy cave has risen, creeping up and covering part of the path that leads to the cave with the pool and the waterfall where the main neck of the river snakes through. The river itself seems much higher, covering the tops of the rocks he liked to stand on when he fished. The current is much swifter, and much, much stronger, ripping at the backs of his legs. He has to fight and strain to wade around.

Wherever the water that feeds the river has come in from, it’s risen the surface high enough that fish must be able to make the swim from the outside, because they’re everywhere Kagami looks, their silver backs darting beneath the surface around his legs as he wades.

The waterfall is absolutely raging, a white blast of water crashing into the pool below, a continuous violent beating that churns the deep water, chopping it up into black waves. It’s feeding the pool along with the rough and turbulent spill tumbling down the cave passages to join the river’s racing path out of the cavern and deeper underground. The pool has risen too, its shallow shoreline shooting out and sprawling itself through the cavern. Kagami has to walk for twenty yards or so through water that stays at about ankle height until it really starts to deepen.

He wades around calf deep, stands there and watches the waterfall batter the pond for some time, hands on his hips, slightly out of breath. The water coming through the cave has definitely been affected by the rain, because the waterfall is so huge and coming down so fast that it’s curving slightly as it shoots out the opening in the rock, splashing and scattering as it crashes down. It’s lifting away from the cave wall behind it.

Actually— the longer Kagami looks, the more he squints in the dark and creeps closer to try and get a better look, because now that he’s noticing, he’s starting to wonder… 

Is there a tunnel there? Is that—?

Kagami frowns. He’d assumed that the back wall of the cavern was smooth continuous stone all the way around, but now it really looks to him as though there’s a hollowed out space or some kind of passage behind the falls where water is flowing out. 

He circles the bank for a while, but can’t get a very good look, so he decides to swim out a little ways. He’s pretty curious. He hasn’t done much more exploring in the cave past the areas he’s already searched, and for some reason, the thought of some secret passage behind a waterfall absolutely mystified him— 

It’d be cool to get back there, if he can. Maybe something’s there. His mind conjured up disparate thoughts, each of which he realistically knew he wouldn’t find, but he sorely needed something to interest him after such a long time trapped underground in the dark, nothing to do but hunt around to try and feed himself so that he could live another day and do it again. If he can pretend, for just a minute, that he’s an explorer, that he’s adventuring, he can forget how hungry he feels, how bored and how trapped he is.

Maybe there’s treasure, or a skeleton, maybe a ledge where he could sit and stare through the falls from behind, right up close—

_ ‘Or maybe—’ _

He swallows hard, doesn’t let himself complete the thought. Doesn’t let himself get too excited yet, but the hope is already buzzing within him furiously like a bee in a glass jar. 

_ ‘Maybe it leads outside—’ _

Of course he has to try to get a look now, so foolish or not, Kagami removes his shirt and lays it on one of the boulders on the shore, still high enough to poke out of the shallows, and then he wades in. He dunks himself under as soon as he can, comes up gasping and wiping the water from his eyes, slicking back his hair. The shock is exhilarating, feels like a strike from lightning through all his bones. Shivering all over and quickly going numb to the chill, he hurries to push himself out into the deeper areas, deeper than he’s ever dared swim, working his arms and legs hard to try and warm up. 

The floor drops out from under his feet, and he submerges briefly to swim for a rock not far from him. He digs his slippery hands into it, scrambles up onto the top of it. The current is pulling him hard already, tough to swim against, drifting him downstream. 

There’s another rock closer to the falls, completely dark from the continuous spray that mists its craggy surface. Kagami slides off carefully, back into the icy water, and strikes out for the other rock, fighting the pull of the current.

He clings to the slippery face of the boulder until his muscles scream, fumbling and plunging back down into the water each time he slips. At last he pulls himself up, an ungraceful shimmy, legs spread to grip on. Thighs shaking, he slowly tries to stand and straighten up on it, and then quickly throws his hands out to the wall with a _ slap _ when his foot slides in some slime. 

There _ is _ a hollow back here, a dark gaping hole in the wall, a tunnel with a low ceiling that sucks up the white foam spilling off of the battered surface where the waterfall plunges down. It swallows the water that rushes in like a huge gaping mouth. 

The water is so deep here that if he were to go into the passage, he’d have to swim down it in complete darkness—

He’s just pondering this when he gets an instant to process the odd sensation of his breath going backwards, his gut swooping hard when he slips on smooth stone, and this time he can’t catch himself. He’s leaned out too far and it happens too fast, and before he even knows he’s fallen, he’s gone down ass first into the water.

The undertow of the waterfall has him in an instant, immediately ripping him under.

It pounds into him like the cave ceiling collapsing, crushed under a million tons of rock. It drills him down, drags him to the bottom, traps him there and batters him. For a few moments he can’t even move, in too much pain, too surprised, but trapped in the blackness with no air, he’s struck with such a terror, such an intense, raw, animalistic fear that he starts panicking hard, goes completely hysterical— 

He can’t think straight, he’s never been this afraid in his entire life— it goes beyond fear. The adrenaline rush is so powerful that he finally understands what they mean by fight or flight, he recognizes the wide frozen eyes of a deer before it bolts from a pack of hounds, feels that pit of dread in his own frantically pounding heart—

He claws wildly, kicking and flailing blindly, disoriented as he’s thrown up and down like a cork bobbing in the surf, whirling and beaten to bits.

The air is punched out of him, and the pressure is bearing down on him so hard, the force of the water hitting him so fiercely that he can’t even choke, can’t even suck in water and drown. 

He can’t swim, he’s stuck, and he feels so weak against the current, mind a whirl of absolute terror, adrenaline burning through him like fire. If not for that burst of energy, he would have snapped his muscles to bits by now, struggling for his life. He’s being crushed within absolute blackness, tumbling endlessly, terrified and desperate. It’s so cold, and he feels completely helpless. 

_ Is this what dying is like— _

He whirls around hard, flipping and tumbling, and his foot smacks into something. Whether by luck or pure animal instinct, Kagami gets his feet under him and kicks out as hard as he can, shoves himself one flailing kick at a time, dragging himself out from under the tremendous pressure until it lifts from his back, his chest, his head— 

He swims and he swims, struggling to the silver rippling glint of light, the surface, air. When he escapes the undertow, he pops to the surface and screams out a desperate gasp. His lungs inflate like balloons in a tube of needles, shrieking with sudden stabbing pains. He goes back under floundering, confused and shaken, scared out of his mind. 

He flails and floats in the current for some time, until he finally washes up in the shallows, coughing and crying as he drags himself on his hands and knees, holding himself up on weak shaking limbs. He heaves and gasps, vomits, trembles all over from shock, left reeling—

It takes a long time to recover from the adrenaline rush and take stock of his injuries, he’s so shaken up that he still can’t think straight, can’t think of what to do, can’t process what’s happened and that he’d somehow survived.

When the adrenaline filters out at last, he starts to hurt all over. He’s tender and bruised on what feels like every fucking inch of his flesh. What’s worse is the sharp, piercing pains in his skull. It’s so intense that it’s debilitating. His body feels so weak that he almost can’t hold himself up.

He has to crawl and struggle his way to a rock poking up, finally slumps against it and collapses in relief, still submerged to his waist.

He curls up, arms around his middle. He feels like his entire body is broken. A weak moan escapes his lips, confused and slurred.

He’d whacked his head on a rock when he went under. It hurts so bad. 

Lifting a hand, he feels at the crown of his head, pressing his fingertips on the left side, on the huge bump that had raised up on his scalp. He winces, teeth gritted when pain shoots through his skull, intense stabbing pains that hit him so hard that it makes him salivate in response to the nausea, it blurs his vision, makes him feel like he’s going to wet himself.

He takes his hand away and hunches in on himself, and then sort of just… _ lays there _ in a pained daze until he loses consciousness.

He doesn’t know how long he floats in and out, but when he wakes up, he hurts everywhere, worse than before, and he’s got the shakes so bad that he can’t even stand at first.

The water has dragged him a bit, lapping at his sides and his neck. He’s laying on his back, ears submerged, water gurgling into his mouth and swaying his face with every ripple. He manages to sit up, but is hit with a huge wave of vertigo, head spinning and plunging.

Soaked and shivering, Kagami takes a long time to pull himself up, and eventually stands on wobbly legs. He hurts all over, gritting his teeth against the aching, and stumbles slowly through the water that bites at his calves. 

He throws a hand out to the wall for support, leaning on it heavily as he retrieves his shirt and tugs it on, his chilled and dripping flesh soaking through the fabric in a moment. He wanders blind in the tunnel, breath rasping through his lips, one arm hugging his front as he limps along, feet stumbling and shuffling.

“No luck?” Aomine calls when he sees him coming. The words hit his ears and don’t mean anything. Uncomprehending, Kagami just tries to keep on his feet, slow and stupid, lazy-eyed.

When Aomine really _ sees _him, he just stares silently. His eyes are so round. Kagami sways a step, staggering forward. 

“Wh—” A whispery breath leaves Aomine, choked off and trembling. “What the fuck,” he gets out.

Kagami tries to make a noise, shake himself out of it, but all he can manage is to stand there, sagging at every joint.

“What happened to you.” His voice is so high. Strained and scared. Is that what he sounds like when he’s scared— “Kagami. Hey,” he demands, louder. Kagami shakes himself.

“I’m fine.” He touches his head, still wet even after his long walk back through the tunnel. 

“Hey. C’mere.” Aomine looks pale in the darkness, his expression blank but for those wide, wide eyes, white all the way around his quivering irises. The gaze of a wolf— a crazed, rabid one— 

Kagami looks down to see what his feet are doing and sees that his shirt is red all over, soaked through. His hands, palms spread for inspection, are slick and red.

“Kagami. Come _ here,” _ Aomine barks. The way his voice cracks echoes through the cave, rattles through Kagami’s ears over and over.

He thinks that might be what snaps him out of whatever zombie-like walking coma he’s been trapped in, functioning, but barely, body moving on autopilot with an empty mind— some sort of fugue state that is so hard to get out of. It’s like staring off into space, but just… never coming out of it.

Something’s wrong. He knows something’s very wrong but it’s like he can’t react, it’s like everything’s buzzing and numb other than this pounding pain that pierces him right in the brain. He’s not scared, not like before, it’s more this sense of dread that builds in the background, a general unease tinging the confused fog clouding Kagami’s mind.

He goes to sit down, hauls himself over to him and practically collapses against the bars, panting hard. Aomine reaches through, hand swiping across Kagami’s face and neck, a warm wet mess. His palm comes away red, slick with watery blood.

When the haze starts to clear and he comes back to himself a little bit, everything’s just hurting even worse. He can think more clearly, remembers where he is and what’s happened, but he feels so tired and irritated that he sort of just screws his face up, brow furrowing, and slumps over for a moment of rest.

Kagami rests his head on the bars, hanging down low in exhaustion. Aomine smears through his hair, trying to make him tilt his head to the side so he can feel around at his scalp. He keeps trying to talk to him but Kagami doesn’t have the energy to answer, sitting quietly and breathing.

He picks in his hair for a long time, pulling pieces of it this way and that with fingertips that tremble so bad it tickles Kagami’s buzzing scalp. He mutters that he can’t tell where the blood is coming from, low and quavering— Kagami closes his eyes, doesn’t know how long he sits like that. He hopes Aomine keeps going and doesn’t stop because he doesn’t want to have to sit back up again. He just wants to take a nap there.

Occasional twinges of pain crackle through the fuzz when Aomine moves some hairs that must be growing from where the cut has split his scalp. A hair snags on Aomine’s rough nail and it hurts a little more.

“Ow,” he moans out, pitiful, but doesn’t even have the energy to flinch.

“Shit,” Aomine hisses, hand coming away. He’s parted Kagami’s hair all around his wound. The air feels cold on the wet spot. “That doesn’t look good.” Kagami swallows, eyes shut. “Fuck, there’s nothing to stitch with…”

He’s so weak, his body feels so horrible, he needs to rest. He doesn’t want to talk, he’s just so fed up. Part of him wishes— just a small part— that the blow to the head had finished him.

Wishes that he’d gone to sleep and the waterfall had just tossed him around under there for days and days until his decomposing body liquified and tainted the river, leaked down the mountain like sludge.

“What did you _ do? _” Aomine sounds so cut up and freaked out that Kagami finally speaks, keeps it short because talking makes his head ache. He opens his eye for a second, looks wearily into Aomine’s creased face, and grunts out an explanation.

“I fell.”

There’s a few beats of silence. He sits there slumped over with his eyes shut, head back on the cage. He swallows, tries to relax, the dark and the quiet soothing him slightly. 

Aomine keeps shaking him by the shoulder. “Kagami—” He won’t stop saying his name.

He’d like to stay here and just lay still for a while, but Kagami lets out a breath, shifts until his feet are under him, and then braces his elbow on the top of the cage as he slowly stands up, eases himself upright— _ makes _ his weak and hungry and broken body do what he wants it to.

And then he starts shuffling off, one unsteady step after another, teeth gritted, brow drawn low with aggravation.

He can hear Aomine shift behind him, watching him go for a few silent moments, and then, like he thinks he’s gone insane, demands incredulously, “What are you doing.” A beat of silence. “Kagami. Hey.”

“Fish,” he says— he’s got to go back. He can’t remember why he ended up here, it was stupid to wander down here when he’d just have to go back anyways. He must have zoned out.

Even if he can think a little more clearly, it jumbles up on the way out, and the pain is making it hard to keep going. Even breathing hurts, he thinks he might have cracked a rib. He’s really boned himself. The next few days are going to be _ hell— _

“Hey,” Aomine says sharply. “Hey, no. Stop!” he snaps louder when Kagami keeps dragging his feet along. “Where the fuck are you going.”

Kagami grits his teeth and slows to a stop, trying to stand up straight, cupping his stomach in his arm.

“Are you nuts?” Aomine barks at his back, harsh and shrill with worry. And, as if he can physically stop him, he demands, “You’re staying _ here.” _

“We didn’t eat yet today,” he gets out, a low rasp. He sways and stares down the tunnel.

“It can wait.”

_ “No, it fucking can’t,” _ Kagami shouts, losing his temper on a dime and turning enough to rage at Aomine with blurry eyes, frothy spit seething through his clenched teeth. His voice makes his head hurt worse, the echoes ring and rattle his brain. 

It sounds like him in his head, but what he hears in his throat and in his head isn’t what his ears hear from the outside. He doesn’t recognize his own voice when it echoes back. He sounds like a wolf, like a roaring wildcat, like an animal— He doesn’t even sound human.

“What, are _ you _gonna’ take care of us?!” 

He’s losing his cool, temper and hysteria building rapidly and bursting out of him. There’s no other choice. He has to keep going no matter what condition he’s in, because he knows— _ he knows— _if he stops, he won’t start again. If he stops to rest, he’s going to get worse in the morning. He has to keep going as long as he can. 

He can’t let them die. He can’t let himself stop— _ he can’t— _

“Kagami!” Aomine shouts, and Kagami lets his head fall back, swallowing hard, eyes screwed up pitifully as the anger just _ leaves him__,_ like slapping out a wet rag. All that’s left is this choking helplessness, despair.

His head flops forward, feels so heavy as it hangs between his shoulders. He can’t look at Aomine, mouth contorting.

Can’t accept the fact that he’s just doomed them both.

He doesn’t want to look at him right now, wide-eyed and dirty, starving away in a cage. He needs Kagami, relies on him completely. He can’t take care of Kagami if he gets sick or hurt, can’t take over for the two of them and forage for food in his place. He can’t just pop out of the cage and feed him and put a wet cloth on his head and let him sleep, he’ll have to sit there behind the bars, unable to help or do anything but watch as Kagami struggles and slowly dies.

If Kagami collapses and worsens in the morning, can’t get up, there will be no one to go get food and water for either of them, which will only weaken Kagami further in his vulnerable state. If Kagami slacks and takes time to rest, Aomine has to suffer too. If Kagami bites it in here, Aomine will starve alone.

The thought makes him feel so angry yet so helpless, and the rage of their situation, the tangled poisoned mess of feelings for Aomine growing within him, the thought of being responsible for giving him hope and then taking that hope away, failing them both for the last time, he can’t bear it.

He was supposed to survive. Get them both out.

“Aren’t you… aren’t you hungry,” he forces out, a cracked squeak of a whisper. 

“I’ll live.”

Aomine has that look on his face again. So incredibly calm, mouth flat, eyes steady. So blase. As if to say, what’s a few more days spent starving, what’s a night without food, it doesn’t matter, Kagami getting a rest matters more— 

Clothes still damp and dripping, flesh so cold, too tired to shiver, Kagami looks at him, vision suddenly swimming back and forth, two pictures that won’t line up. He doesn’t blink so that the moisture will cling on a little longer and not fall.

“You stay here and rest,” he insists. 

Kagami stops fighting and does as he’s told for once.

He doesn’t have the energy to make a fire and warm up, so he just removes his wet clothes and lays them out, then decides to squeeze out the excess water and let it drip onto his bleeding head. Aomine helps him try to clean the gash, since he can’t see it on his own and would have to feel blindly and poke at it otherwise. 

They rip a wet strip of cloth and tie it carefully around Kagami’s head and then hang Kagami’s clothes on Aomine’s cage to drip dry. The pressure on the cut hurts for a few moments but a little later, he finds that it makes it feel more secure, like it’s holding him in. The tight bind actually makes the wound stop throbbing if he stays still and quiet.

He’s dead on his feet at that point, barely conscious as he eases down and huddles in a ball on the cold floor, hugging his damp flesh and trying not to shiver because it’s exacerbating his headache.

Aomine sits next to him, pulls off his dry shirt and stuffs it through the gaps. He presses his warm back flush to the bars and lets Kagami slump against him. He even sticks his hand out behind him so that Kagami can lay his head in his palm and not on the hard ground.

He manages to get Aomine’s shirt on with the last of his energy and then lays still, feeling choked up from momentary relief.

His shirt is warm. Smells like pee and fish. Kagami pulls his arms in the sleeves and hugs himself.

He doesn’t know how long he lays there, eyes half open, silently staring and aching all over, part of his head touching Aomine’s side, or maybe his belly, through the bars. He can feel him breathing.

Maybe it’s been an hour. The shadows cast by the shafts of light through the leaky ceiling have changed position, slowly creeping past him. 

“I hate this,” Kagami breathes, a cracked whisper in the silence. 

Aomine shifts, maybe picks his head up to look at him. He sighs. “Yeah.” 

Kagami screws his eyes shut. Wishes he would’ve drowned. He thinks he understands now, Aomine’s resigned and bitter smiles, the jokes he makes about wishing they would’ve just put him out of his misery at the start— they weren’t jokes. Kagami feels too tired, doesn’t want to struggle and suffer anymore. He just— 

The fire in him, the fire that’s kept him going this long, that fire’s gone out.

“I fucking hate this,” he croaks, chest tightening up and burning. 

Aomine shifts again, shuffles and turns a little, looking down at him, strewn on the ground in a ball. Kagami’s throat tightens and he puts a hand out of the shirt collar and closes his eyes under the shade of his palm, can pretend to hide there as he grits his teeth and scrunches his brow. 

“Why can’t I just fucking die already,” he wrenches out, emotional. “I want it to be over— I—”

“Hey.” Kagami can’t swallow through the pain in his throat, the prickly, tight, and oddly dry feeling that always swells up when he tries to fight tears. Aomine is practically cooing, his voice a strained and whispery attempt to soothe. “Hey, we’re gonna’ get out,” he murmurs. 

It’s so hard in that moment to even _ want _ to get out. Not if it means that he has to keep suffering. It all feels so pointless that Kagami doesn’t think it’s even worth it anymore.

“You said.” He sounds so incredibly bleak, trying to convince Kagami of something that he’d never even believed himself.

“No.”

“Kagami,” Aomine croaks, sounding choked up himself for a moment as he puts a hand out and hesitantly places it on his arm, squeezes a little. “We’re gonna’ go home.”

“Home where. They’re not gonna’ take me back anyways,” Kagami chokes out bitterly, not even bothering to try to keep it together anymore. It’s too late. Aomine can already hear his voice cracking, so there’s no point— 

Kagami’s only nineteen, but his young life has been a good one. An easy one. He’s his parents’ only son, heir to an old and wealthy family. His father loved him dearly. But there’s some things that even the beloved son to a rich father can’t get away with. 

When rumors of that son kissing boys out in the fields started to crop up, when that son becomes known for swimming naked with the young men of the village, his father looks the other way. Not everyone does.

Nasty, if not truthful rumors go through their social circle for what feels like forever, but Kagami’s left alone long enough that he expects he can just keep going on living as he has with no real negative repercussions. He skates by on the credit of his family name for quite some time, from age fourteen until now— 

Until he realizes that not all the attention he’s garnered has been negative, and some of it has come from unwanted sources.

Cornered in his home by an adult man, one of his father’s business associates that he’s known since he’s been very small, someone who’s brought Kagami trinkets when he visits as far back as he can remember, Kagami misstepped. 

Pressed to the wall, aggressive and hot requests, presented with a proposition from a man easily three times his age, a very rich and influential one— Kagami doesn’t think it through. He reacts with immediate and undisguised disgust, teenage indignance at the thought of being attractive to someone he found more repulsive by the second. He denies the advances, maybe a little rudely, shaken up, and he doesn’t consider the reaction that his scorn would provoke. Maybe he just expected things to turn out fine as usual because that’s just what he’s been used to from birth. Any problems he encounters, he somehow gets out of them. Being his father’s son has always been enough until now.

His mistake is not telling his father about the incident immediately. If he had, he may have saved himself from his current fate. His father may have been able to intervene when there was still time.

He doesn’t expect it when not a week later, he’s met with accusations by the same man who’d grabbed and groped him, except the story seems oddly inverse. He doesn’t expect any of what happens next either, not really understanding how serious things are getting until it’s basically already over.

The walls close in alarmingly fast.

He’s been spoiled, perhaps a little too much, maybe his father’s attempt to fill the hole his mother left in their lives, or to try to make up for all the seasons he’d sent Kagami to boarding school, separated them when he shouldn’t have. Kagami doesn’t begrudge him that, now that he’s older and understands that his father had found losing his wife as hard as Kagami had found losing his mother, and having to raise him alone may have been painful— He may have not always spent much time with him or been particularly warm, but he’s never doubted that his father desperately loved him, his pride and joy. 

Kagami himself, his son, was the most precious treasure in his life.

When the son he loves more than anything is accused and charged with seducing an older man, a public official, tempting a good man with the wicked charms of his youth, and when, to keep the truth buried, that son was ordered into the harshest punishment in a corrupt proceeding, death by exile— _ if I can’t have you, no one can— if you don’t want me, then I’ll ruin your life, I’ll show you— _

When Kagami realizes he’s dug his own grave fooling around during his teenage summers, creating a reputation for himself that will ensure no one will believe his side of the story, when he’s sent off to perish like the low-down animal he is and realizes his exile was in fact a front created by a man who doesn't want him coming back, doesn't want anyone to hear from him ever again, when he sees the _pit... _ When Kagami's buried where god will forget him, a place to die that will drop him straight to hell— 

When Kagami’s damned and it’s time to go, the last time he sees his father, he doesn’t even get to say goodbye. His father collapsed in anguish, too overcome by grief to even see his son be taken.

Kagami’s former life, everything he’s ever known, it’s all over. He’ll never see his friends again. His front door. Flowers or birds or the sun meeting the horizon at night. His brother’s face. He will never, never get back home again—

What had his plan been anyways. Somehow get out and then go back? Show them all they couldn’t keep him down? And if by some miracle they didn’t do something else to him, hang him, quarter him, if by some godsend he was allowed to get on with life— _ how, _ with the reputation he’s garnered. How, when everyone and their mother knows he’s been utterly disgraced. The man who’d gotten him put out here, he’d made sure to drag his name through the mud and cover his own tracks. Everyone, everyone knows about Kagami’s proclivities— _ ‘I bet you like that.’ _ This dream he has of going back home and everything being just as he’d left it, there _ is _no going home for him. Home no longer exists.

It’s just an idea he’s held onto. A memory he’s been struggling towards, fighting like there really was something out there to fight for.

Maybe for a minute he’d let himself believe that by surviving, by dragging himself back out of here and refusing to die, he’d get the last laugh. He’d prove something. 

He can’t die down here. He can’t give them the satisfaction.

But now… now he can’t find the will to go on even one more day.

Aomine doesn’t speak when Kagami goes quiet, no more words left to slip through his cracked lips. The silence feels hollow and awful, poisoned by Kagami’s secret, laid out there in the open for Aomine to recoil from.

He’s brought it on himself, being put here. It’s what he deserves for such a twisted mind. Aomine must see that now. Kagami doesn’t blame him for not knowing what to say.

He lays there feeling bereft, utterly empty, like he’s screamed himself out and now there’s nothing left but a husk. He feels absolutely stripped bare, so rotten he can barely move. Aomine shifts, and he swallows, gets ready for it.

“Well,” Aomine murmurs, so soft. He can hear the smile. “Whatever else I’d blame him for, I can’t blame him for wanting you—”

Kagami doesn’t breathe, just stares, feeling tight in the chest. He feels Aomine’s hand on his head and finally squeezes his eyes shut, lump in his throat.

He’d expected that to be the thing that finally got Aomine to stop flirting, that his confession would finally, finally scare him off, because he had to realize that it wasn’t a joke anymore, it can’t be a joke anymore to pretend that he thought Kagami was handsome and worth flirting with like a pretty milkmaid or stall girl. He can’t go on with this silly game when he knows for Kagami, it’s not a game. It’s not pretend. It’s not an act he can drop or a coat he can simply take off. It’s him, the sodomite— 

And in the face of such a story, the ugly truth laid out, he’s still teasing just like always, his voice low and easy-going. Words that would otherwise seem a cruel jab spoken so tenderly that they don’t wound, they don’t offend.

They settle on him like an angel’s wings, warm and heart-wrenching.

Kagami lets out a long, long breath, shoulders loosening. He doesn’t know if he’s relieved exactly, it doesn’t lessen the pain racking his broken and battered body, but a pin-sharp shard of bitterness piercing his heart seems to ease and melt away.

Aomine lays down next to him and tells him to get some sleep. His warm breath is ghosting on Kagami’s neck, but he doesn’t turn. He wishes he could say it’s only because he’s too tired and in too much pain, but he probably wouldn’t have the balls even if he was fine. Wouldn’t have the balls to admit that he’s known for a while that his feelings have been changing and growing into something he still can’t escape. Wouldn't have the balls to admit that he wishes more than ever that he and Aomine had known each other before all of this. But it's a knife in his side, because he's realized now that he still hasn't learned his lesson. Near death, starved and hidden from the sun, even here, even now, Kagami's heart doesn't learn.

He’s lost count of how long they’ve been down here. He’s vaguely sure that it’s been longer than a week, less than three weeks— He almost wishes he’d kept count.

The shadows are lengthening. Dusk must be approaching. Kagami feels so hungry but knows he won’t be able to handle getting up to forage. He drifts in and out for some time, feeling Aomine gently fumbling around behind him, fiddling with some rocks and scraps like always when he’s bored.

“Hey Kagami,” Aomine mumbles, quiet, maybe to avoid waking him in case he’s asleep. Kagami shifts a little, moves his head so he knows he’s listening. 

His voice is low. Oddly intimate. Makes Kagami feel sleepy. 

“Kagami, look.” It takes him a minute to muster up the strength, but he heaves himself up onto an elbow, manages to carefully pick up his legs and shift his hips so that he can gingerly roll himself over without too much painful jostling. He rests his head on his arm and settles on his other side, facing the bars. Aomine’s fit himself next to them on his half, cramped up into the space and curled on his side, head propped on his hand.

He looks, and sees two stick figures scratched onto the metal cage floor with a rock. They’re shiny because of how many times Aomine’s defined the lines, thick scribbles that have dug a divet into the metal sheet. One is in a box, which was drawn with only a single line, making it appear thin and immaterial compared to the figures. They’re holding hands through the box.

Aomine grins at him cheekily— grins at his dried-blood, sallow-skinned, wasted-muscle, beat up, bruised, and busted ass. He winks.

Kagami would kiss him right on the mouth if he could.


	6. Chapter 6

Kagami feels worse in the morning.

Much worse— The pain hits him before he even opens his eyes, dragging him right out of the usual period of dozing where he’ll drift in and out.

His head is throbbing and aching, and as he grunts and tries to open his eyes and sit up, an intense wave of nausea slams through him, intense dizziness and sickness making him sway. The headache going on on the inside, his inflamed brain screeching and throbbing against the inside of his skull, it’s almost worse than the sharp horrible aching of his cut scalp.

Kagami had a dog bite on his bottom when he was a kid. This feels like that wound did on the second day, pink and swollen as blood rushed to the site to heal it quicker. Tender and painful and oozing with infection— the swelling actually hurt worse than being bitten had hurt.

He dry heaves once, but manages to stop himself when the strain of the motions just sets off a litany of crackling stabs of pain through his chest and gut. He feels like one gigantic bruise. His limbs and his torso and his back, god, his _ back _, every inch of flesh is tender and sore, an intense aching twinge of pain shooting through with every heartbeat. It’s like it’s traveling through every vein, into every muscle, every organ, every bone. He tries to inhale, but too deep and a stitch in his side, a sharp prick makes him stop.

Just existing is absolutely agonizing.

Carefully lifting a hand to the top of his head, Kagami winces as he touches at the core of the pain radiating through his head and face. He can’t even really feel the sensation of his fingertips rooting through his hair around the wound, can’t feel them touching the cut, not until he presses too hard, and then he just feels an intense stabbing jolt, like an electric shock. The pain is excruciating.

He breathes heavily through his open mouth, saliva pooling on his lower lip. His gash is inflamed, scabbed over in places where he touches it, wet in others. He pulls his fingertips back several times, but the moisture isn’t blood. It’s pus and it smells like shit— 

He feels woozy and incredibly fatigued, like he hadn’t even slept a wink. It’s probably been hours and hours, because it’s light again. He’d gotten through the night in one solid block of consolidated sleep, and now hunger is clawing at his insides again.

So caught up in his own suffering, his aches and pains, it takes him a second to become aware of his surroundings again when Aomine shifts behind him. He’s talking to him. Telling him to stay and rest a little longer. His voice is so steady, doesn’t betray the hunger that Kagami knows must be gnawing at him. Kagami can smell pee, an acidic assault on his nostrils. Aomine needs a drink.

Kagami tries to cough, clears his throat and tries to make a sound. He’s as quiet and steady as possible to keep from aggravating his headache with anything sudden. “I’m gonna’ get some water soon. I’ll take it easy—”

“No way,” Aomine scolds. “What if you faint down there.”

“I’m not a fucking baby.” He knows what he’s capable of. He knows his limits. If he takes it slow, he can do a bit of walking. He just wants a fucking drink. 

“Don’t act like one then.” Kagami’s temper flares, worn dangerously thin. His pains are making him irritable. “You need rest. A gash like that would have you laid up for weeks in bed if we weren’t stuck here, so—”

“But we _ are.” _ Aomine’s quiet. Kagami can hear him grinding his teeth. A dull scraping that makes him fight a shudder.

“You shouldn’t be up,” he grumbles at last. “You shouldn’t waste any energy. You need it to heal.”

“I need food and water to fucking heal.”

“Oh yeah? So you can fall and crack your head like an egg again?” Aomine prods, raising his voice, frustrated. “You’ll be alone if something happens. What the fuck are you gonna’ do then?”

“Whatever, I don’t wanna’ fight right now.”

“Really? Because you’re doing a great job showing your ass.” Kagami clamps his teeth together and can taste blood on his tongue, even through his rancid sick-breath. “Are you fucking listening to me?” Aomine snaps. “This is not the time to go on some weird crusade for your pride.”

“I’m not in the mood, Aomine,” Kagami growls, lifting an eye to meet his. Aomine’s face is stern and moody, doesn’t back down from Kagami’s glare, but the creases beneath his eyes instinctively ease. He must look pretty beat up.

“Bitch at me if you want. If it makes you stay here, then I don’t give a damn.” 

It’s infuriating, but he knows deep down that he’s right. Beneath the denial, he knows he’s not mad at Aomine, he’s just infuriated that he’s injured, a shitty situation gone even shittier, no one’s fault but his own. An accident that’s going to cost them.

“Fine,” Kagami breathes, when he’d rather scream. “Fuck you,” he bites out spitefully, and Aomine just ignores him.

“Let’s make another fire,” Aomine suggests. “Since you’re staying.”

It’s a waste of the wood, since they don’t have anything to cook, but Kagami would rather try to be active and do something than lay down and try to sleep at the moment.  
  
They use the scraps that they have left. It takes most of the day. Kagami fails repeatedly to start it, the crick in his side, the needle digging into the balloon of his lung making it too difficult to keep blowing. Aomine exhausts himself trying again and again to make another spark so he can give it another shot.

When they get it going, far too much effort expended for a pitiful little flame, Kagami gives Aomine his shirt back and rests by the fireside, lays his aching head down on his arm, and dries his own clothes.

They’re still damp. He hangs them on a stick and holds it by the fire until they’re warm and dry. Slips them on and tries to feel some semblance of comfort.

He wakes again sometime later. His internal clock feels that it’s been a very long time. The fire pit is completely black and cold. He feels a flare of irritation that Aomine hadn’t woken him to add some more wood, but when he sits up to chew him out, his voice dies in his throat.

Aomine’s slumped boredly to one side, knees up, arm around his stomach. He’s chewing on his nails, eyes glazed over like he’s lost in thought. He nibbles on one nail, then the next. His fingers are bleeding stubs.

Kagami feels a surge of guilt. Aomine hasn’t complained once or urged him to get up to go forage, just patiently tells him to rest, insists that he not push himself. In another time, another place, Kagami would feel touched by such a kind and thoughtful act, but now it makes him feel sweaty-palmed and panicky.

He feels so weak. He’s going to get weaker. He needs to go get some water and find something to eat so he can keep himself going. He’s in bad shape and it’s not like there’s anyone else here who can take care of him, he’s got to do it himself. He has to bring Aomine some food and water too— 

Kagami sleeps another night, and in the morning, Aomine seems like he didn’t get restful sleep, because although he seems unwilling to let Kagami go into the cave alone, he’s dazed and doesn’t seem to have the energy to talk him out of it again. 

He’s feeling better. Really. Or at least well enough that he can cope with walking there and back.

“Don’t overdo it,” Aomine warns, but his gaze kind of meanders as Kagami nods and heads off. He seems out of it.

When Kagami makes it back to the pool, he doesn’t try to get behind the waterfall again, but he does resolve to do a little more exploring, feeling slightly better being up on his feet and moving around, and he hasn’t stopped being curious about the way the water flows out— if disgruntled after his very painful accident.

It’s stopped raining, and the water has already receded quite a ways, about halfway down to where it usually is. The shore is practically littered with crayfish, the shallows swarmed with them. Kagami sits at the edge with the soles of his feet in the water, and carefully removes the cloth from his head.

He tries to unknot it as gently as possible to avoid jostling the wound, and then realizes it was futile, because he has to practically rip and peel it away from his head where it had stuck to his hair and to the encrusted pus that had dried in the fabric. The cut stings and burns in the open air when he separates his bandage from his skin.

When he pulls it away, the cloth is dark brown with dried blood. He washes the strip and scrubs it on a rock, and then carefully scoops handfuls of water up and pours them over his head, rinsing his hair and dabbing gingerly at the cut with the cloth scrap. The cool water soothes it.

He leaves his bandage off for a while to let the cut get some air, taking his time in wandering to some back passages to gather mushrooms. He fills his pockets up, carries them back to the riverside and empties them again in a little pile.

His headache has receded to a bearable degree after taking a few drinks of water. Enough so that he can hunker down without swaying and seeing spots. He squats in the shallows, pant legs rolled up, and nabs crayfish one by one, scooping them up in his hands and bopping them with a rock to make sure they won’t crawl away. 

He nabs about thirty something, even with his slow hands. They move in a fat and lazy swarm, sluggish enough for him to catch. With how easy they are, he’d stay to grab more, but his legs are starting to shake from hunching over and he needs a break. 

Deciding to do a little cave exploring before he makes his way back, he munches on some mushrooms as he walks, and leaves his bundled shirt and their food on a rock. With the water level having sunk back to a reasonable level, Kagami’s able to wander a ways into the dark area that the main river flows through from. 

It’s almost pitch black, and when he kicks a rock into the water, the _ plunk _ echoes down ahead of him into the distance. At some point the ceiling starts to lower to meet him, but it’s so dark he hasn’t any idea until he feels it brush on his hair. 

He brings his hand up to feel what it was, smacking it on the ceiling. “Oh,” he hums to himself, shuddering and starting to feel a little uneasy between the narrowing rock walls.

Good thing he hadn’t whacked his head on the roof— shit, that would’ve been bad. 

Kagami stands there in the blackness for a moment, just listening to the rush of water, hand braced on the low hanging mass of rock. 

They’re on the mountain, right— so Kagami figures that the water must be flowing downwards, towards the sea. Water always flows towards the sea. The water is seeping out of the cave through underground passages, cracks, but it’s also coming _ in _to the cave. 

Rainwater and snowmelt, feeding this inlet, trickling in from… somewhere.

Kagami’s feet are in the water now._ ‘Man, it just keeps going—’ _

He crouches down to fit himself into the space, the ceiling continuing to drop until he has to practically crawl forward, stooping and feeling around blind. He’s starting to breathe heavier, swallow over and over, heart pumping hard. 

No, okay, he’s had enough. No, no, we’re going back now— He tells himself this, and stops in his tracks, takes a few shaky breaths to settle down. Going back— 

He doesn’t think he’ll ever adjust to being underground in complete darkness, a sort of sensory deprivation that is terrifying on a primal level, but he’s done a good job until now not psyching himself out imagining cave monsters or creatures of the night waiting in the dark for him. He’s kept that kind of senseless fear at bay, and if he keeps his mind carefully blank, he can stay calm in the dark, especially in the more familiar passages. Walking steady and slow, hand on the wall as a guide, he can keep his head.

What happens next throws all of that to the wind.

When Kagami tries to turn around on all fours to start heading back, he feels stone brush the pads of his feet, feels it brush his shoulder, thick solid rock walls cramping in on both sides of him, and the swoop of dread is so intense that when he instinctively jerks, he feels himself get wedged in between the two stones.

Blind, unadulterated panic bowls through him for the second time in how many days. He cries out, alarmed at how little his voice echoes in the tight space, and starts to hyperventilate, his breath coming faster and faster, quick shallow frantic breaths through his mouth. _ He’s stuck— he’s stuck— _

Water is pooling around him. He won’t be proud later of how much he loses his head, but in the moment he can’t think, succumbing to full-on panic. He flails and strains, ends up hurting himself and making things worse, like an animal in a metal foot trap. He scrapes his arms and ends up wedging himself tighter in his struggle, twisted backwards, so contorted that he can’t move.

Pitifully trapped, he finally lays still, having exhausted himself. Head spinning, body charged with terror, he believes, _ truly believes _that he’s going to die, so scared that he vaguely realizes he’s wet himself. Trembling like a baby deer, he just lays there and cries.

For a long time he can’t do anything else, shaking and scared, until he slowly, slowly tries to turn himself back around, untangle himself, and pull himself forward on his belly. He lays his cheek flush against the cold wet rock, water in his ear, and heaves to drag himself further into the blackness, freeing himself.

He doesn’t try to turn again, instead just shimmies himself out backwards an inch at a time, sniffling and hiccuping. He chokes through trembling wet lips, feels warm snot dribbling down his chin, and for a long time he can’t do anything but whine and whimper, shaking and scared.

When he gets back out into a wider area, is able to pull himself up, he just sits there crying it out, hugging himself, traumatized.

His head is in agony. And he’s trembling uncontrollably, heart racing. He feels so bad, so incredibly bad that he thinks he might vomit, might have a heart attack and keel over from stress. His eyes and throat hurt from crying and the crotch of his pants is warm and soaked. 

Unless he can bring some sort of torch back here, he’s not going to try that again. No fucking way. He doesn’t want to go through that ever, ever again. 

It takes him a long, long time to pull himself together after that.

When he does, he stumbles back out of the passage into the cavern. Splashes his face with water and takes a long drink to settle his shattered nerves. He gathers some wood, hacking a few branches off with a sharp rock he broke off the cave floor, a big stalagmite. He carries the armful of sticks under one arm and uses his shirt to carry his pile of crayfish.

When Kagami finally gets back to bring Aomine the food, he feels a bit better. He’s looking forward to that comfort, finds himself anticipating it more and more as the days pass, Aomine’s unfailing smile, a flirty greeting, happy to see him when he comes. It makes his heart swell and flip. Because he knows, maybe he’s always known the reason he’d attached himself to Aomine so quickly, faithfully promising to survive with him. The reason he’s come to care for him so much when in any other circumstance, they’d likely have stayed strangers.

Maybe he’s always known that Aomine’s exactly the type of boy he would’ve spent his summers with, a youthful infatuation. If he’d been given the chance, back out in the world, he would have fallen for Aomine like mad. He’s the kind of boy that would’ve driven him wild. 

He doesn’t know what he feels, what’s building in him as they go day after day, trapped here together, it’s all a tangled and complicated mess, but Kagami knows one thing— he wishes, _ fiercely wishes, _that he’d known Aomine before all this. Before they got locked in here.

When he heads back, tears and pee washed away, a not insignificant bundle of food in hand, he expects a clamor. It’ll have been the first time he’s been fed in days, and there’s of course the expected shit about how he worried him taking so fucking long, slow-ass, what kept him? 

Instead, he’s met with something entirely different.

When he comes back, Aomine is talking.

Kagami pauses in the archway of the tunnel and watches him, thinking at first he’s just caught him unawares, talking to himself to pass away the boredom, but something about the whole thing makes him feel uneasy.

Aomine’s moving strangely too. His hand is in the air, making these weird aimless twisting movements. His expression is dazed and lax, but his eyes seem oddly fixated. Kagami swallows hard. 

Is he… Is he hallucinating?

This isn’t like the loud frantic struggle in the tunnel or fighting for his life underwater, heart hammering in his ears, terror driving him to insanity. This is a bone-chilling sensation of dread, crawling from the base of his spine and standing the hairs up on his back all the way up his neck.

“Aomine?” he manages, and Aomine stills, hands frozen there in midair for a moment. He lowers them, turns his head to look out at him.

“Kagami,” he says. Kagami approaches hesitantly, heart in his throat as he comes into better view.

Aomine’s eyes are red and wild, completely bloodshot. His hands are crooked into claws in his lap. His fingertips are raw and bitten stubs. Kagami slowly crouches in front of him and Aomine just keeps staring, eyes wide and manic but his body is oddly still. 

Kagami reaches through and takes his hand in his, puts food into his palm. Aomine eats almost mechanically. “Water,” he requests, and Kagami curses mentally, shit, he forgot water—

“I’ll go back in a minute,” he promises, even though he’d like to not go back down through the cave anymore today, still pretty shaken up from his claustrophobic nightmare, the feeling of the entire weight of the mountain crushing down on his back, squeezing the air from his lungs.

Aomine’s hands shake and fumble as Kagami feeds him, gives him pieces of food one by one. His fingers are so boney, the flesh pulled tight across his tendons. Kagami passes him the mushrooms until they’re gone and he’s eaten them all up. He organizes the supplies he’s brought, walks around to deposit the pile of wood with the other scraps, sweeps some fallen ash over to the firepit with his foot.

“That’s so many,” Aomine says. Kagami turns and sees he’s noticed the pile of crayfish sitting on his shirt.

Kagami’s about to offer a smile and mention his luck today, try to lighten the mood and forget about his bad experience in the crawl space. He’s about to ask him if he wants to help peel the shells, but Aomine’s eyes look hollow and bleak, he’s slack-jawed and confused. 

“Why didn’t you kill them.”

Kagami doesn’t understand, brow creasing. Aomine doesn’t say anything else. He stares and stares at the pile of crayfish.

As if it’s a crawling teeming mass.

He watches Aomine swallow, hears the dry working of his throat, sees the moment recognition passes through his face, which goes pale. His gaze doesn’t flicker, round-eyed and stiff with horror.  
  


A cold pit of dread forms in Kagami’s gut.   
  


Aomine is quiet for an hour after he eats and drinks, Kagami having hurried to bring some water. He sleeps for a bit and seems better. 

By that, he means Aomine seems more _ there, _more in the present moment— but his mood stays pretty low.

“I think I might be able to find a way out,” Kagami murmurs. Aomine doesn’t say anything, curled in on himself in a corner.

Warily, he continues. “Wherever the water goes, maybe it flows down to an exit. I think I’ll walk and try to see where it goes…” Aomine lets out a long breath and shifts, trying to stretch himself out. He looks so, so worn and frayed. Oddly subdued. Like whatever had come over him, once he’d come out of it, it’s sucked all the energy out of him and now he’s...

Tentatively, Kagami tries again, to start conversation. Anything to break the silence so they can pretend they both don’t know that Aomine’s mind is going. 

“Then when we get out, we’ll know the way—”

“No.” He stops, blinking when Aomine finally responds, one dark eye slitted towards him, his slack expression finally creasing. “If you find a way out, then obviously you go out right away. Don’t fucking turn back—” 

_ Are you insane—? _ He doesn’t have to say it, his tone says it all. 

Kagami wrinkles his brow in confusion. “... Of course I have to turn back.” How else are they going to get out if he doesn’t.

“Why the fuck should you.” Aomine’s tone is sharp and his expression is growing darker by the second. “If you could get out _ right now—” _

Kagami knows where he’s going with this and tries to cut him off. They don’t need to go down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good. There’s no point dredging it up again. 

“We’ve survived this long down here,” he insists. “What’s a little longer until we figure out how to open this.” 

The cage. The thing that is keeping Aomine down here no matter what. This thing— that ensures that even if Kagami finds a way out of the cave, Aomine can’t come with him. A surety that Kagami’s still fiercely denying.

Aomine’s eyes are suddenly alert and piercing. Pain and anger swirls through his troubled gaze, some harsh demand that Kagami just stop pretending. Stop trying to make him hope for the impossible.

He puts his hands around the bars and lets out a breath. “Kagami,” he rasps, eyes closing, suddenly bereft.

Upset, Kagami blurts out, “If I was in there instead of you and you found a way to walk out of here, you’re telling me you’d split just like that and leave me here to die?” His brows pinch, his hands clench and unclench in his lap.

“You wouldn’t try to help me?” He says it almost scornfully, like this is a ridiculous idea, because how could anybody do that. How could anybody even treat that like an option, to leave someone behind to save themselves. It hasn’t even crossed Kagami’s mind. Maybe that’s why it bothers him so much when Aomine says stuff like that, because he doesn’t want his mind to go to such a dark place— 

“You’d just… what, abandon me?” He forces a laugh. 

Aomine jolts like the only thing stopping him from lunging is the bars between them. He grips them and practically throws his body against them, snarling through the gap with his teeth bared. It startles Kagami enough that he jumps.

_ “Yes, I fucking would,” _ he spits, cruel, ferocious— 

“If I got to get out _ right now, _ yeah, I’d leave. I wouldn’t fucking come back to save you too.”

Kagami’s sure he looks gobsmacked, staring at him as he raves, unhinged, like a wounded animal striking out blindly. Aomine doesn’t stop, like somehow he’s wanted this. Wanted to shock him. Wants to make him hate him. 

“You think I wouldn’t trade places with you this second—” he growls, “to make my situation the tiniest bit better?”

Kagami’s breath is still in his throat. Something cold and slimy is slithering in his guts, uncertain, horrified. Hopeless. 

“You don’t mean that,” he gets out, but it doesn’t sound like him. No confidence. So weak and breathy.

Aomine’s just going crazy. He’s just desperate. He’s humiliated and worn down by their situation. He’s hungry and angry and achy and he’s feeling bitter, wants to lash out, wants to hurt something to make himself feel just a little less shitty. It’s not about Kagami really, he’s just suffered too much and he’s starting to crack. 

“You’re not that kind of guy—” 

“Yeah? And how would you know what kind of guy I am. _ Kagami, you don’t fucking know me.” _

Kagami’s jaw shuts with a click. Aomine’s teeth are bared and his eyes are hard. 

“Not everyone’s as naive as you are. I wouldn’t give a shit about you dying if it meant I got to live. I wouldn’t have fucking fed you if you were in my place. I would’ve kept it all for me and let you _ fucking _ starve—”

Aomine’s scowl has loosened into a ghastly grimace, brows pressing upwards. Maybe he doesn’t realize he’s doing it, that his intimidating front of anger has melted into something different. That the gaze of a wolf has transformed into something sad, a pitiful mangy dog.

A glassy eyed stare that lacks something human.

“And when you died, I would’ve eaten the meat off you,” he says after a beat. Kagami shakes his head, feeling like horror has scooped out all of his guts and filled the hollow.

“I would’ve eaten your fucking corpse,” he hollers, seized with some horrible energy, like he’s trying to scare Kagami as bad as possible, drive him off, say the worst, most vile, disgusting thing he can think of so that he’ll finally just— 

“No,” Kagami hears himself say, it seems so quiet, oddly calm under the ringing tones of Aomine’s shrieks rocketing through the cave.

“I wouldn’t have even waited for you to starve, I would— I would crack your head and eat your fucking brain!” he hollers, short manic bursts through heaving breaths. “If it made me live a little longer, I’d kill you and eat you! If these bars weren’t here I’d eat you right now!”

“No, you wouldn’t—”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t fucking believe you!” he shouts back, and Aomine growls, furrowing his brow, clenching his eyes shut. He drives his forehead onto one of the bars, like Kagami’s so stupid that he wants to bash his own skull in.

“Aomine, _ stop—! _ Stop saying crazy shit!” he yells, but it sounds like begging to him. “I swear to god I’m gonna’ punch you in the mouth! _ You’re not gonna’ fucking eat me, that’s insane!” _

“Yeah?” He clamors at the bars. “You think I won’t?” he spits. 

“Fuck no, you won’t!”

“It’s a good fucking thing for you that I’m in here, because I’m exactly the kind of person who should be locked up.”

He stares at Kagami for a long time, panting, like he’s waiting for something. Like he’d expected something.

Kagami’s shoulders hang loose and limp. He clenches his trembling fingers into fists. Tries to act like Aomine isn’t ripping his heart to shreds.

“Aomine…”

His lips twist with a bitter smile, the look of a man who doesn’t care about anything anymore. Like he knows Kagami doesn’t realize what he’s really capable of, doesn’t believe he’s as awful as he says, doesn’t believe he’s the kind of despicable guy who would leave him if it gave him an advantage— 

He’s got this look on his face like he’s going to _ prove _ it to him— _ I’ll show you. _

It honestly scares Kagami worse than the psychotic screaming.

“You’re fucking thick-headed, aren’t you. Fine,” he breathes. “You know how I got in here?” Kagami swallows. “You know why the fuck they put me in here?”

He feels sick. Part of him wonders how much worse the truth could be than what he’s imagining. Wonders why Aomine reacted to Kagami’s horrible secret with kindness and seems so intense about his own.

“My dad wasn’t a fisherman.” Kagami looks up, swallowing hard. Aomine hasn’t exactly calmed down. His gaze is colder, more calculating. Like a circling predator. Still as dangerous, still as bloodthirsty.

“Well he was. He was a pirate,” he says shortly. “My mom was his bonnie. I’m their bastard—”

Kagami feels like he can’t move. His ribs feel oddly tight. He doesn’t know where this is leading, but the tension is suffocating. Aomine’s tone is outwardly mellow, but it’s not fooling him.

He doesn’t know why Aomine’s telling him this, doesn’t understand how he can switch it on and off like that, how he’ll just bitterly smile like it’s all a big joke some times and rages others.  
  
“Left on and off until I was eight. Never saw him after that.” Aomine slows then. “And when Mom went, it was just me left to protect Satsuki and Auntie.”

Kagami swallows hard, because he has an inkling of what’s coming now.  
  
Aomine gives him a look of such rage that Kagami instantly recognizes it. Something he’s felt time and again himself: mind-melting, boiling-hot, steaming _ rage— _

And yet, there’s something there in Aomine’s stare that chills him. A cold glint that no longer reminds him of the glowing eyes of a dog staring out through the pines. This is something beastly, too intelligent and malicious.

It’s _ murderous._

“The debt collector said he’d forgive it if he could have my sister.”

Kagami’s heart stands still. He stares into Aomine’s eyes, and remembers what he’d said before, about his family owing money, and his blood runs utterly cold.

Because he remembers now. Why he’d felt like he knew Aomine’s name. He did know it. He’d heard the scandal, not long before his own. A half-bred mongrel tried to kill a man and make off with his gold— it must be him. Has to be. 

But he can’t accept it. Doesn’t want to believe it. Wants to keep going on pretending that the friendship they’ve forged down here hasn’t just been through forced circumstance, that it’s been something real, that Aomine’s a good person who’d just gotten shafted like him— 

Hasn’t wanted to believe Aomine could be capable of something horrible. But he’s learning more and more that the depths people can be driven to when they’re desperate have no end.

“He said to just give her over and the landlord doesn’t have to hear about our missed payments. _ Lord Kagami _ doesn’t have to know—”

Such a thing should be said through clenched teeth, should be spat, a furious hiss, a growl, but Aomine’s voice is dark and heavy. The hairs are standing up on Kagami’s back.

It shouldn’t surprise him. Maybe he’s known deep down and has just been denying it because he wasn’t strong enough to face it. Hasn’t been able to face that the debt Aomine’s family owes, he might owe it to his own father— and that Aomine’s troubles were caused by the middlemen sent to bring that blood money back to Kagami’s doorstep.

“I told him to fuck off— Well, he didnt.”

He sounds like himself again for that one moment. Sounds like a regular kid. Sounds like Kagami would if somebody was bothering his brother.

His hands grip the bars tight again and he makes Kagami look at him, lip lifting in a snarl. He starts to raise his voice the longer he goes on, working himself up

“He started following her. And pressing her on it. Waiting ‘till I wasn’t around to scare him off so he could fuck with her head and make her think it’s the only way to save the family—”

Kagami can’t look at him then, because it’s too hard when the voice goes out of his words, a raw whisper.

“She was so scared.”

An explanation. One moment where he’s pleading for mercy, for Kagami to understand. Try to put himself in his shoes and think what he would do if it was someone he loved— 

Aomine swallows and takes a breath, looks up at Kagami from hooded lids. 

“So I told him to take me instead.”

Kagami’s eyes shoot to his and he feels his gut twist, because Aomine doesn’t look broken. He looks like he’s daring Kagami to hate him. Scorn him, pull away in disgust, see him as some filthy creature who’d sunk too low. He looks like he’d do it again if he had to.

He doesn’t look ashamed. He looks filled with fire.

“I’d do whatever he wanted.” He isn’t shouting anymore but his words still cut him, like he’s trying to shock Kagami as much as he can. Horrify him. 

“He can hurt me, he can piss in my mouth, tie me down with my legs up and get every man in the village to come use me. Anything—” he says, and Kagami clenches his jaw. 

“Anything.”

Aomine looks down for a second, head hanging. “Just… just leave her alone and let us go. Take me, I know how to do it, I’ll make it good— That kinda’ shit, right?”

Kagami doesn’t want to hear the rest, but he knows Aomine’s going to make him. He wishes he could open his mouth to tell him stop, he doesn’t want to hear more, stop, but he can’t make a sound.

“So he did.”

He wants to block it out, wants to believe it isn’t true, doesn’t want to hear this and imagine it, but he can’t do anything but sit there and stare into Aomine’s face, a strange mix of furious, traumatized, and vulnerable. _ Wrathful— _

“Took me in the back and railed me with his pathetic dick,” he grits out, spitting like his words are a bitter poison. “When he gets done using me, I realize— I fucking realize how stupid I am for falling for that load of shit. I let him fucking degrade me and it didn’t even matter. He’s gonna’ take her anyways. Just as soon as he ends my pathetic life.”

It’s a horrible kind of laughter to hear ringing through the cave, a short bark. 

_ “Lord Kagami’s not gonna’ hear about this, right?” _

Kagami’s eyes are wide, stomach sick.

“So I beat him,” he bites out, low and sharp. “I went crazy on him and kicked in his teeth and I strangled that fat fuck until his eyes were going back. I almost fucking killed him. If I hadn’t been such a little bitch, I’d’ve done it, too.” 

He clings to the bars like he wants to scare Kagami, wants to prove something to him. Prove he’s a killer. That he belongs in here. That he’ll hurt Kagami too if he keeps trusting him like he’s some kind of good person— someone strong who could never be driven to do something so terrible— 

“It felt good, Kagami. Making that son of a bitch pay. I got off on it. If I could have gone through with it, I’d have finished him right there,” he says, and Kagami stares, horrified.

“I’d have made him gargle on his own blood. I could’ve done it,” he insists, but it’s more desperate somehow, like this is what it’s come to, like he’s holding this up as a trophy for Kagami, _ see—? Don’t you see what I am? _

“None of it was even worth a damn either, because we still owe,” Aomine says bitterly, barking out through gritted teeth, “and now I’m who knows where on a fucking mountain instead of home where I should be— to keep those pigs from raping my sister.” 

Shoulders sagging, breath coming in gasps, Aomine glares at him. “So you get it?” He hangs on the bars, skinny chest puffing his baggy shirt in and out.

“That’s why I’m in a fucking cage. That’s where you put monsters—”

Kagami’s lips part, heart thumping to a stop as silence falls rather suddenly. Aomine pants and stares with wild eyes. Waiting. He looks so sure, so sure that this is it, this will make Kagami see the real him, the ugliness he’s been hiding, this will make Kagami go. A desperate threat that he'll hurt him too, if he lets him. He'll kill him too— 

“You’re not.” 

Aomine face starts to crease, his cheeks bunch up around his eyes, his mouth contorting, chin screwed up.  
  


“Not to me.”  
  


They seize each other.

He’s not sure if either of them moves on their own or if they both go in at the same time, slamming together— Aomine thrusts his hands through the bars and snags him by the head, tows him in, and Kagami rushes to meet him.

Aomine’s face bangs on the bars as they grab at each other, whack teeth, kiss hard and claw to get closer. Kagami sticks as much of himself in as he can, arms digging through the bars, his forearms wedging into the gaps so he can seize Aomine’s hair and clutch his head close to him.

It’s not so much a kiss as it a wild attempt to suck each other’s souls out. He kisses and licks at Aomine’s mouth, desperate and rough, and Aomine practically gnaws at his face, like he really is trying to eat him alive—

Aomine’s hanging onto him with a strength that should have left him by now, _ clinging _ with lean arms gone wasted and boney, hands feeling like hard talons, fingers digging into him, hooking his flesh.

His mouth tastes like death, his breath smells like rot— 

Aggression and rage and frustration has built up in Kagami’s young starving body. His blood is pumping hot with a delirious exhilaration. 

Can he suck his dick through the bars? Can he back up to the bars so they can connect? He doesn’t care if Aomine smells like piss and has a sour tongue and his body is a sad wasted husk of skin and bones, he needs to _ fuck _ something, feed this animal—

Kagami breaks away, saliva connecting their lips in a string. Aomine has marks on his face from pressing into the bars to kiss him, bashing his cheekbones. His mouth is wet. His pupils are quivering pinpricks.

He watches Aomine gulp and watches the hungry look in his eyes turn into something else, wide scared eyes set onto a pile of crawling scuttling creatures, devouring each other. The eyes of a rabid wolf.

“I wish I’d have done it,” he rasps, voice trembling. “I dream about laying there, thinking he was the last thing I’d ever see.” He takes a little breath, a choked gasp. “Die with his dick inside me.”

Instead of convicted, instead of that spiteful nastiness, so insistent on proving he’s rotten, all Aomine can get out is a hollow, horrified whimper. And Kagami can hear just how badly it had screwed him up, to have found out he was capable of going that far. It had really, really fucked him up—

“God, what have I done,” he breathes. “Everything I did… I sunk so low and it wasn’t even worth it.”

His hands are shaking where they dig into Kagami’s scalp. The white of his eyes draws Kagami like a ghost in the dark.

“What would she think of me now, if she knew.” 

His voice wrenches and cracks, and he swallows through it, nodding a little. Kagami breathes through his mouth, heavy and wet, and suddenly he realizes. 

All this time Kagami’s been running, not wanting to face the truth— the truth that while he’s been drawing hope from being together, Aomine’s been blaming him for all his hurts and pains, the landlord’s son. He hasn't wanted to consider that while he's been drawing close to Aomine, consoled by his company, Aomine's been rotting there and hating him with all his might— 

He recognizes the look in his eyes and knows now that Aomine’s been hating himself. He knows. Knows now why he always jokes about dying, jokes about how he hopes death comes for him soon.  
  


He’d already lost the will to live long before they’d put him in here.  


“This is better, Kagami, can’t you see that?” he rasps. 

  
  
  


“This way I don’t have to live with myself.”

  


His eyes are begging him. Telling him it’s better. _ It’s better if you escape and leave me to die. Do you see? I went lower than I thought I could go. I’m capable of things more horrible than I could have imagined. I can’t carry that on my back— My regrets._  
  


_ I can’t escape this stain on my life. _  
  


He says it but he holds on and holds on and holds on as Kagami pulls back. He says it with his mouth, but his heart is crying out to Kagami, screaming for him. He tries to hang on but Kagami breaks his grip, pulls back.

His face is drawn tight with desperation, anguish, wide eyes searching out Kagami’s. His hands stay there like that, reaching, his fingers like crooked teeth, hands clawed into nothingness.

  
And maybe Kagami’s finally facing it. The fact that they _ will _ die.  
  


The hands that reach for him, the hands that hold him, how soon will they turn into bones. 

The face he’s kissed, how soon will it look back at him as an empty skull, those dull eyes nothing but dark black holes.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> losing steam on my project but I plan to crack down and write today!! Over halfway so it's downhill from here!

The water bed is low— lower than Kagami’s ever seen it, and try as he might, there is no food to be caught from the pond.   
  


His time spent on foraging is useless. Hours of wading in the water will turn up nothing. The fish must have swum downstream as the water receded. The trickle of water that runs through the sky portal cave is looking so sunken and shriveled that he wonders if it will run completely dry soon. 

Kagami honestly doesn’t know what they’re going to do if it doesn’t rain soon— but in the meantime, the drought has sunk the river down enough that the outlet tunnel can be explored. 

Kagami’s been wandering back there.

He only been able to make himself repeat the terror of pulling himself through a crawlspace because he knows their only hope to find a way out is if he’s brave enough to keep looking. Being uncomfortable, being scared, it feels worth it when he’s sitting at Aomine’s side, watching him waste away behind those bars— 

But when he’s back here— back here, it never feels worth it. Nothing could be worth this overwhelming dread.

He can hear the occasional distant drip and splat sound of drops of condensation softly pattering to the ground. He crawls for a ways in complete blackness, hands trembling as gravel pokes into his tender palms, grit pinching at his knees. He goes for as far as he dares, but eventually turns around, utterly alone under what feels like the crushing weight of ten thousand tons, the entire mountain bearing down on him, only able to hear his own breathing and the sliding sound of him dragging himself across the rough ground.

He walks down an unexplored tunnel with a burning stick as far as the passage goes and as far as the light will take him— makes it into an unexplored cavern, hanging with hundreds of stalactites, great spikes that loom above him like knives. 

He stands and holds the torch up to look above him in awe. There are columns too, stalactites that have grown so large that they’ve met the stalagmites reaching up from the floor. The rock formations are sparkling, glittering with tiny crystal growths that feel like cold studs beneath his palm, damp and chilled.

The high ceiling is beautiful in a haunting way, like being in the mouth of some ancient umbral beast, its teeth hanging and waiting to gnash him, him and the entire world— 

There’s an impulsive urge to scream one last time, and watch them all fall, suspended for one instant before they stab into him, impale and crush him, snuff him out for good.

The fire flickers and glows, the ember burning low. He should go back.   
  


He wishes Aomine could at least explore with him. They could walk together here in the darkness. If they could huddle together at night without the bars between them, keep warm, he may derive some sense of comfort when he tries to sleep. They could create little camps, travel through the tunnels until they find an exit. If Kagami didn’t have to return every day, if Aomine could move with him, he’d be able to search further— 

Even just this. If Aomine could see a sight like this, beautiful little shards of crystal coating every surface like shimmering faceted glass, he thinks it might help him in some small way. Give him something to live for.

They’ve both been doing pretty rough in the last week as the riverbed sank further and further. Kagami’s head constantly aches, pus coming from the cut and crusting in his hair. If he touches his head, presses on it at all, stabbing pains shoot through his scalp, every nerve in his body setting on fire. His body still feels badly bruised and sore from his fall in the water, and going hungry is prolonging the healing.

The food he’s been able to gather has barely been enough the last couple days, and the situation is devolving rapidly.   
  
Morale is already low after Aomine’s little cannibalism episode, their subsequent screaming match, and the kiss, none of which they’ve talked about, settling back into a tentative peace— but it doesn’t last.

He has an inkling that Aomine may have been closer to starvation than he was from the beginning, because the few days without much to eat have hit him so much harder than they’ve hit Kagami. He’s been affected so badly that at times, Kagami thinks he seems a day or two away, perhaps  _ hours _ away from a complete mental breakdown.

He usually urges him to sleep as much as possible during the day, and tries to keep him company in the evening. Ride it out with him. Get through it with him, and then resolve to search even harder tomorrow, because he doesn’t know what else to do— 

When Kagami talks to him, he seems slow and at times, confused. He keeps picking his head up to look over at the wall, like he’s heard something. He’s so weak that his fingers tremble when Kagami passes him food through the bars. When he drops things, he can barely even pick it up. Mushrooms, a small handful, a few morsels for him to put in his belly.

“I already ate mine,” Kagami lies. It wouldn’t fool anybody, but Aomine just swallows hard when Kagami gives him the rest. He eats it all.   
  


They struggle to light another fire even though it expends precious dwindling energy in their effort to get it going. Kagami suggests it half because Aomine won’t stop shivering, and half because he wants to give him something to focus on, a futile attempt to snap him out of it.

He can’t get it going, spinning the stick back and forth with best effort, but it’s too feeble, breaks him out in a cold sweat until Kagami takes over and lets Aomine direct him instead.

They have no food to cook, but Kagami thinks that you have to spend some energy trying to survive so you can live, and then use the rest on a comfort, however small, because you need a reason to live as well. 

They lay and listen to it pop and crack until Kagami’s used up much more of the gathered wood than was wise. It’s glowing low, the red embers spitting up ash. 

Aomine’s laying on the floor of the cage. He’s staring upwards. His stomach’s been growling for an hour. He hasn’t moved.

Kagami lays with him and tries to just close his eyes and pretend it isn’t happening. Pretends he hasn’t heard Aomine crying at night, quietly weeping, tries to pretend that when Aomine cycles between trying to crush bugs in his cage that aren’t there, talking at nothing and scaring Kagami out of his wits, and this somehow more terrifying state of utter lifelessness— he tries to act like it doesn’t bother him. He just sits with him and tries to act normal, tries to pretend that he isn’t watching a human mind completely deteriorate right before his eyes.

When Aomine talks, it’s the first time in what feels like so long that he sounds this sane. It doesn’t startle him, too quiet and weak, like just another pop off the fire. 

“I’m scared,” he whispers listlessly, cracked and broken. 

Kagami feels a lump come to his throat.

“I’m starting to see things,” he croaks, a little louder, almost a normal speaking volume. Kagami tries to swallow but it can’t get past the pained choked up feeling. 

He turns to Aomine, picks himself up and crouches at the bars, looking in at him. Aomine can’t even turn his head to face him, but his eyes roll towards him beneath lids that drift open and closed.

Kagami puts his hands on the bars and curls his fingers around them, licking his lips. Aomine picks his hand up but has to lay it back down on his chest.

“Kagami,” he breathes. It’s so pitiful that it brings Kagami’s heart into his mouth. “I feel so weak.”

He feels an overwhelming sense of helplessness overcome him. He doesn’t know what to do— what can he do? He doesn’t want to leave him when he’s like this, but… but he has to try to find something that can help him.

He leaves his side and tries not to return to all of his horrible memories, alone in the dark tunnels. Memories of Aomine staring right through him, laughing at nothing, a confession that he’s terrified that Kagami just won’t come back one day, he’ll just wait and wait but Kagami won’t return, and he’ll never know— he’ll never know if Kagami had abandoned him or if he’d died back there and it was his turn next— 

Or the worst of all, a fevered intense look in his eye, utter desperation as he begs Kagami to eat him, he’s not going to make it anyway— and if he can’t find it in him to pick up a rock and end him now, then when he passes on his own, please,  _ please,  _ eat his flesh and survive—

Just the memory of his eyes, his poor face, the urgent strain in his voice and the strong grip on Kagami’s wrist as he gave him that one last request, it makes him fight to contain furious sobs.

He goes to get water, tries to check for food again, foraging in almost total darkness deep into the night, but the crayfish are lean and swift and he’s searching practically blind. 

He brings Aomine water and Aomine sips and sucks at his wet shirt. Kagami has to hold it in his mouth. He urges him to keep drinking and fill his belly, keeps coaxing him to suck on the cloth. 

When he’s done his tongue is dirty and white, leaving a clean patch on Kagami’s dusty shirt.

He looks like he hardly has energy left to speak, or even breathe. Kagami holds the bars in his hands, looking in at him. Aomine won’t even shift himself towards Kagami. He usually does, so he can get warm.

“Aomine,” he hisses. Taps a bar. 

“Hey,” he prods him. “You awake?”

“Kagami?”

“Yeah.” Kagami licks his lips. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“I’m so cold,” he breathes, freezing Kagami’s blood. “... I’m so cold.”

Kagami grits his teeth. He stokes up the fire. Brings the light back. He wastes the rest of their dry wood and breathes the coals to life.

The fire-light on Aomine’s face flickers, horrible black tongues of shadow sitting in the hollows of his eyes. He doesn’t move again for a long time, and Kagami just crouches at the bars and darts his eyes over him, watching him breathe.

Kagami’s honestly not sure he’ll make it through the night. And maybe that's the hardest thing to accept.

“I wanna’ come out.” He twitches a finger. “Sit with you—” Kagami reaches in, strains and tries to squeeze his arm in as far as he can. Aomine nudges his arm towards him just a little so he can take it. 

As Kagami lifts his hand, pulls it to him, his arm feels so much lighter than he’d expected. His hand is so cold and limp. Kagami squeezes it between both of his own.

He sits with him for a long, long time, until the light is low again. An hour— 

“Wish I could hold you,” Aomine murmurs, his eyes drifting open a little again, a dull gleam in the darkness. Twin stars in the glow of the dying coals glinting off them. As the light of the embers pales, their shadows on the wall seem to flicker as though they’re sitting side by side.

  
  


“Just once.”

  
  
  
  
  


He doesn’t say anything else. 

  
  


Kagami stares for a while, unblinking, not even breathing much. It doesn’t hit him right away, a creeping despair slowly building into a tidal wave of grief— It’s too much to handle, too horrible, swelling and boiling like magma trapped underground, his fury raging like a volcano.

Shoulders heaving, teeth gritted, he drops Aomine’s limp hand to the ground with a slap. Stands and whips around, eyes wild.

He gets a rock in his hand, gripping it tight, and then slams it into the corner of the cage, a loud clang echoing through the cavern like the slam of a metal hammer hitting a boulder. 

He tries bashing at the cage door, hitting it wildly in his desperation, harder,  _ as hard as he can— _

Chipped shards break off the stone in his hand, clattering to the ground, but the door doesn’t even rattle on its hinges. His blows aren’t doing anything.

He roars aloud, furious, grabbing the bars and shaking them.

“Stop,” Aomine says, too quiet in the ear-shattering echo of his rage to reach Kagami. “Kagami, stop,” he breathes, when it’s clear that it won’t work. Long after Kagami knows in his heart that it won’t work and is just taking out his anguish on the thing, bashing up his hands.

Kagami hits at it, pulls on the door, bracing his feet on the corners and straining at it. He inserts his finger into the lock, picks around until he draws it back bloody. He shakes the door and throws his weight on it, hollers, a rageful scream. It doesn’t budge. Kagami can’t get to him.

He slumps his forehead against the door, head hanging between his shoulders. The silence that follows his fit is so hollow that he thinks he finally understands what it is to give up. Lose hope completely.

Aomine’s shallow breaths make him grit his teeth, eyes clenched shut. “Kagami,” he says. “If you’ve found a way out… you’ve got to leave. You’ve got to—” Kagami puts a hand over his eyes, biting his lips, shoulders heaving.

“Even if we can’t find a way to get me out too.”

He shakes his head, covering his face with his palm. 

“If I don’t make it, don’t blame yourself,” Aomine gets out, voice cracked and raspy. “Go survive. Make sure one of us gets out of this. Promise— promise me that all this fucking bullshit wasn’t for nothing…”

Kagami shuffles around to sit by his head, take his hand again and grip it tight. Aomine’s grip flutters against his. Through cracking lips, a dry throat, he whispers, “And can you tell Satsuki, if you ever find her.”

His breath shakes, rattles in his lungs as he draws it in. Chin quivering, Kagami chokes out, “I will.”

“And don’t forget me out there, okay? Don’t forget about me.” 

Kagami pulls Aomine’s hand to his mouth, rests his forehead on it, gritting his teeth and biting his lips. Presses their clasped hands to his cheek. Folds Aomine’s hands on his middle for him and scrubs at his eyes, letting out a rough breath.

  
  


_ Of course I’ll remember you for the rest of my life—  _

  
  
  
  
  
  


He searches the cave farther than he ever has before.

In the deeper parts of the cave, all Kagami finds is dead ends, the tunnels either collapsed or half formed. What confounds him is that this cave is in the mountains, and yet, instead of going down further and further as caves do, the path that leads off from the waterfall pool leads him slightly  _ upwards—  _ He doesn’t know what that can possibly mean.

The water is so low that when he circles back to the cavern, he just stands there for a moment and watches the pitiful trickle of the waterfall, suddenly remembering his slip— he remembers the open space he’d found back there just before falling and hurting himself.

With the flow of the current having slowed considerably, the waterfall is scattering, a more gentle drizzle, thin enough that it looks like a black pane of glass, and behind it, he can see the gaping maw behind the curtain of the falls.

There’s no wall back there, just as he remembers. It keeps going.

Kagami swallows and considers for a moment, then wades into the water, swimming out towards it. This is his chance. If there’s any time to do this, it’s now. They’re all out of options anyways. Aomine’s run out of time.

He skirts the rip of the waterfall, which pulls and splashes at his shoulders, but the current is too gentle to pull him down this time. It pushes and drags at him, but he stays above the surface, eyes squinted shut when the falls pass over him, dousing the top of his head.

He swims behind it, and treads for a moment there, arms paddling behind him as he stares down the dark tunnel. It doesn’t stop. The water seems to be pulling him this way.

Wary of getting trapped, he tries swimming back out, just to be sure. As it stands, the greatest risk at the moment seems to be tiring out. He’ll just have to take care not to drown by exhausting himself.

Kagami floats on the surface for a ways every couple minutes when he starts to breathe hard, his limbs tiring. He tries to see down in front of him. The walls seem to glitter like sparkling crystal. It’s really beautiful actually, the reflection of the water’s surface and that of the walls seeming like shimmering stars. It’s like being suspended in a vortex, a portal to a starry night sky.

The farther he drifts, the cave ceiling has started to get lower and lower above him, still a few feet up there, but taking a dip every so often, growing alarmingly close. 

He’s starting to feel the chill in his hands and feet, swimming for as long as he has the energy. Just as he thinks he’s going to have to turn back, the cave ceiling having dipped too low, he feels the floor rising up beneath his feet to meet him too— standing with his feet on solid ground for a time to catch his breath, Kagami resolves to keep going. He wants to see this one through.

The water keeps receding, slowly letting him climb out. Soon he’s wading at around knee height. The flow of the river cuts around a bend up ahead, but the tunnel continues on. Kagami keeps going until he’s out of the shallows and standing on the bank. His thighs are shaking at this point from the effort of kicking to stay afloat for so long, so he takes a minute to stretch out and get his bearings before following the passage.

He walks for some ways, crunching on what feels like gravel and loose stones. He can feel himself going upwards this way too,  _ up and up and up,  _ climbing a slow step at a time, stooping slightly until the ceiling lifts to a more comfortable distance. 

The walls are getting quite narrow, just about wide enough for him to put his arms to each side. He can touch both walls at the same time with his fingertips. Swallowing and trying not to lose his nerve, he keeps going. 

It’s hard to keep a mental clock going when he’s been alone in the darkness this long. He’s got no idea how long he’s been down here, how long it’s been since he got out of the water. He’s not dry yet, but he’s been walking for some time, he’s sure of it. He hasn’t even been able to hear the water in what feels like ages—

No wait. He  _ can _ hear something.

It’s something that sounds familiar. Like he once knew what it was, a very long time ago. Kagami stops where he stands, brow furrowing as he tries to identify it. Man, he’s got no idea.

He puts his arms around himself and rubs his arms, feeling cold all of a sudden. All of the wet parts of his body feel chilled, like there’s a breeze blowing. 

Kagami blinks. Blinks again.

_ ‘Is that…’ _

He can see his feet. Can distinctly make out each toe and toenail.

Kagami’s head snaps up and he squints intensely. There’s a light in the distance, a very, very dim one.

He hurries forward, hand out in front of him so he won’t smack his head as he looks around for where it can be coming from. His heart is starting to thump. Hope, furious wild-eyed hope is pouring through him in a powerful rush.

He rounds a corner, and all of a sudden, stops there, feels his knees wobble, his heart screaming to a halt. 

_ ‘There— There—!’ _

There’s an opening up above him, the path sloping upwards sharply, filling up with gravel. The hole is large enough to fit through if he drags himself on his belly, maybe, or if he digs with his hands.

He stands there staring at it, this hole in the wall, white with natural light that seems blazing bright to his cave-bat eyes. 

He doesn’t approach it, doesn’t crawl up to it to look out. He just stands there at the bottom of the pile of gravel and stares, waiting for it to blink out, waiting to wake up and realize it’s another dream— 

He can feel a breeze on his face, moving his hair slightly, a gentle wind he hasn’t felt in he doesn’t know how long, the painful realization that he’s lost track of the days long ago.

He can feel the wind on his skin, hear the wilds, smell the pines. The outside world… it’s right out there.

Heart in his throat, Kagami quivers before the gentle brush of the wind on his cheek, the song of the forest that feels more real in his memory than ever, having almost been forgotten. He looks out at a door to freedom, and he realizes this is it. Realizes that he’s going to live.

_ They’re going to live— _

He stands there and finally just starts bawling. Falls to his knees and weeps and weeps, the relief consuming him.


	8. Chapter 8

Finding his way back takes what must be hours. 

The travel itself is significant. He can’t estimate how far it is, but together with how much he’s walked and the extra effort it took to travel while he was this weakened by hunger and injury, he thinks it might be about a mile altogether.

By the time he drags himself out on the shore of the pool, he’s too exhausted to forage. He has a feeling it’s gotten to the point where the situation is so drastic, it doesn’t matter anymore if he brings Aomine food. What’s most urgent now is getting out. The second they’re out, he’ll put all his efforts into nursing Aomine and taking care of him— 

They just have to get out and then Kagami can focus on the next task, which will be surviving in the forest. Compared to a prison of stone with so few resources, a forest seems like a goldmine. At least out there they can eat grass and leaves, they’ll have firewood and materials to make a shelter with. It’s going to be tough with Aomine so weak, too weak to help him with building shelter and finding food, but Kagami’s dedicated enough to him that he’ll take charge and shoulder the responsibility. Until he gets his strength and health back, he’ll tend to his care. 

When Kagami finally makes it back to the front cave, the blocked entrance he remembers so well from the outside, being thrown through like a trapdoor to hell, he’s panting, legs shaking and ready to give out on him. He's vastly overexerted himself, may have been awake for an entire day, or even more by this point. The only thing keeping him going is this burning flame of hope, strong and bright— today is the day. Sometimes it had been so hard to believe, but they’ve gotten through it. They’re finally, _finally _going to be free _ — _

When Kagami gets through the archway, Aomine doesn’t greet him. 

It takes a moment to hit him. He just stands there in silence, looking on with indifference, trapped in a dazed sort of shock. It takes a moment of staring at him, utterly motionless, for a pang of dread to strike him. He’s not laying the way he left him. He’s huddled on his side.

Kagami comes towards the cage, slow at first, his heartbeat pounding so hard that it seems to vibrate his vision as he walks to him. As he gets close, he can tell right away Aomine’s very, very sick.

His body has purged every way it can, he can smell it from a mile away, he can see his pants sticking to his legs almost all the way down to his ankles. It’s absolutely putrid. 

Kagami’s got no idea how long he’s been lying there like that, maybe all day, fevered and unconscious, sick and weak and forced to emit in a confined space— 

Kagami’s breath is caught in his throat, imagining him like that, too pitiful to even pick himself up or roll to the other corner, instead stuck laying there in a sewage puddle, maybe hoping in his delirious suffering as it seeps up his back and into his hair that Kagami will come soon, Kagami will come and help him—

He’s tried to throw some away from himself, palms smeared with filth. He’s vomited onto his shirt too and is laying strewn out in a disgusting swill of rancid slime, struggling for breath. Curled up on his side, arms around his middle, his face is creased in a horrible grimace of pain. His whole back is caked with ooze, having lain in it so long that it had leaked up his spine and onto his neck and the back of his head. He must have rolled over during his fever at some point, going fetal.

Kagami reaches through the bars to place his cold wet shirt on his forehead. His hands shake as he tries to squeeze water into Aomine’s mouth. He tenderly wipes his soiled face, his vomit-encrusted lips and cheeks. He cleans the palms of his hands and between his fingers and his black fingernails. Tries to cool his neck and chest. He doesn’t know what to do— _ What can he do? _

Aomine doesn’t even twitch at his touch. He gurgles and doesn’t swallow when Kagami puts water in his mouth. Scared, Kagami reaches in and swats at his cheek, slaps and smacks it until Aomine swallows and flinches back from the pain.

He rolls over in his fever and lies still again.

Kagami stays with him, sits by his head, hand through the bars to hold his flushed cheek. A quiet futility comes over him, numbing him.

“Aomine,” he tries to talk to him. “I found a way out,” he says, soft and low. 

His brain won’t process it. That it can end like this.

“The light… It’s beautiful,” he tells him, a feeble whisper.

“I wish you could see it—”

  
  


He cradles his head for a long time, kneeling at his side. 

Aomine seems to wake after what feels like hours, eyes drifting just barely open. He looks really fevered and confused, and Kagami puts his hand in his so he knows he’s back, can’t stand to think of all the times he must’ve woken when he’d been gone, scared and alone—

Aomine holds onto Kagami’s hand, damp and hot, a slimy and repulsive sensation. He pulls it blindly through the bars to him, holding their clasped hands to his lips, and when his body racks with pain, curling up and straining, his face scrunches, tears squeezing out of the corners of his eyes.

He hangs on like he knows it’s him even without opening his eyes to see him. He clings and clings, tears gathering at the inner corners of his clenched lids, leaking and leaking.

_ I’m scared. I don’t want to die— I wish I could be out there with you—_

Kagami stands up in a fervor. He goes to the river, tears his shirt off and soaks it, and over the next few hours, he goes back and forth over and over, trying to cool Aomine’s fever with fresh water, make him drink and attempt to clean him a little wherever he can reach.

He tries pouring water on the lock in the hope that rust will corrode it over time, but his patience fails him when Aomine’s fever reaches a peak.

He starts hitting it with the rock again, and this time he doesn’t stop. Aomine doesn’t even react to the noise, laying there radiating heat like a sauna. Panting, grunting, his hands are starting to chafe and bleed, his nails are chipping, and maybe it's adrenaline, maybe it's survival mode or some kind of hidden animalistic potential he's uncovered, but Kagami goes until his body breaks, he has to keep going, this can’t be it— 

Aomine’s eyes are closed when a piece of the lock bends— _ bang— _ dents — _ bang— _ breaks— _ snap. _

Kagami pries at the broken spot, splitting his nails, hitting at it and cutting himself up as he struggles, the small amount of progress driving him on. 

He breaks the surface plate to bits, bashes at the inner lock mechanism, so worked up into a panicked frenzy that he doesn’t even think of the fact that his efforts might jam it worse, might crush the metal together into an unbreakable mess. He just wails on it until he’s destroyed it and the door rattles loose.

His shoulder and arm scream in protest and fall limp as he drops the rock. He picks up a shaking hand and tests the door, which opens an inch and then stops. Bracing a foot on the cage, he pries at it, throwing his weight backward until the sticky hinges give. 

It opens.

Kagami crouches down and retrieves Aomine from the cage, hands hooked under his armpits as he carefully drags him out, smearing a trail behind him. As he pulls him through the door, his head falls back, limp.

He holds him in his lap, sitting pitifully on the cave floor in a pile of rubble and broken metal. “You’re free,” he tries.

“Wake up, you’re free,” he whispers, choked up, but Aomine is utterly lifeless.

When Kagami tries to move him, stretching him out flat on his back, and crouches over him, Aomine’s body is completely limp and as cold as the cave floor. The fever has gone and his face is pale. And he’s light, far too light for his size, even with him lying there like dead weight—

Kagami’s throat seizes.

“Wake up, we can leave,” he wrenches out. “We can… Aomine.” 

He hangs his head.

They were going to get out. They were going to make it. They were so, so close… 

Aomine’s heavy head cradled in his lap, Kagami’s hands quiver as they cup his cold face. He swallows again and again, staring down at him. It can’t be over. What does he do now? He doesn’t want to leave without him.

Kagami knelt in a heap at his side, back slouched as he sets him down on the ground. As he moves him from his lap, his head flops lifelessly, mouth and eyes falling open, and Kagami is struck with a horrifying jolt of sorrow and repulsion, letting go of his cold body with a start and recoiling. This can’t be real. How can it be real? They were going to make it. How can he have been too late— 

“No— No, _no, oh god—”_

He convulses with grief. He hugs his stomach and bends almost in two, bowing over him until his head nearly brushes his torso, seizing on a silent sob. When his hair touches Aomine’s chest, he just collapses there, completely broken, face pressed to his bony ribs, and he finally manages to draw breath. 

Cries immediately start to spill out, his shoulders shaking with pitiful sobs. 

_ “Sorry,” _ he tries, but his voice breaks too much. _ “I’m so sorry—” _

He puts his hand into Aomine’s cold one, clasps it to his chest, to his cheek, sits there and weeps bitterly until his eyes are raw and puffy and no more tears will leak out and the sobs grow painful.

Sniffling, he puts a hand out, and with his lips trembling, his fingertips quivering, he gently shuts Aomine’s eyelids and jaw, which had fallen slack. With his eyes closed, he looks as though he’s gone into a peaceful sleep. After weeks, perhaps _months_ of agony and torture, he's finally found rest.

The thought of it sends him into another wave of hysterics, the thought of piling stones on top of him until he’s covered, leaving him to sleep underground forever— or darker still, trying to swim with his weight on his back, carry him out into the forest and then dig a hole with a stick to lay him in— the thought of feeling joy in his freedom when it means leaving Aomine behind, how does Kagami go on living—?

How’s he supposed to go on. Aomine was just here not a moment ago. Kagami was going to show him the forest. 

They were going to make it. He’d found the way out. He’d opened the cage. They were going to be free.  
  
But... but it doesn't matter.

_ ‘I was too slow—’ _

It’s that thought that kills him the most.

"I'm so sorry," he whispers out through lips that feel thick and twisted from crying. "God, I_—" _ He can't hold it in, breaking down, shoulders racked with sobs.

The silence echoing back, the gaping lonely void, the weight of his failure, his guilt and loss, and the sense of utter _aloneness,_ it's unbearable. A howling, empty roar of nothingness that strikes anguish into the core of his broken heart. Trembling, biting his lips hard against the cries that continue to burst through, he presses a shaky kiss to the back of Aomine's hand and presses it to his cheek, clutching it to his face and squeezing hard. 

The cold clammy palm that refuses to warm no matter how long he holds it, it shifts in his grip, and he tries to hold his breath, tries to halt his crying, but he’s been weeping so long that his chest shudders with the effort of holding back the hiccups, he sputters through lips that are wet with spit and tears and snot, his nose pops bubbles. He thinks... He thinks he just imagined that Aomine had squeezed back.

One last dying seize of his muscles? A twitch? 

He holds Aomine’s palm in both of his, rubbing the back of it, and feels another squeeze, a delicate flutter, surely not his imagination.

Kagami sniffs, smears his wrist under his nose, around his face, hardly able to see through his blurry vision, his eyes swollen and pink. He squeezes Aomine’s fingers, clasps his hand in a sticky grasp, clutching it to him as if he can hold in that last little flicker of life. _Bring him back, oh please give him back— _

His belly is moving, a shallow wave, and just beneath his nose is warm with tiny puffs of breath. Still alive, just barely— 

Aomine’s hand flutters against his again, his thumb twitching. Wherever he is, a mind locked deep within a withered skeleton of a body, whether he really knows where he is and what’s going on, whether he can even feel or hear anything at all— to Kagami he feels that he’s being comforted, a stroke of the thumb across his hand, weak but loving.

There’s still a chance to try to help him. However small and hopeless, there’s a chance.

Kagami hangs onto his hand, knowing at any moment he could pass for good. He doesn't want him to be alone when he goes— but simultaneously he's seized with the thought that if he sits idly, he may be squandering his last bid to turn this around, bring him back from the edge. He’s not even sure what he should do, what he can possibly do to help him. How does he save a dying man— 

Fumbling, he removes his pants and lays them over Aomine to keep him warm. He stays with him for a few trembling moments, pillowing Aomine’s head in his lap, warming his cheeks in both palms and cradling his face, smoothing his thumbs under his eyes. Talking to him is almost certain to make no difference, so Kagami takes a few shuddering breaths and closes his eyes tight, tries to pull himself together and lets his forehead drop to Aomine’s for a moment. _I'__ll be back— I’ll be right back— just make it until then— _

Water.

Kagami leaves him and rushes to the river. His bloody hands fumble and quake, his stomach and heart both feel like they’re trying to force their way up his throat, _ hurry, hurry— _

He brings fresh water in his shirt, stumbling to Aomine’s side to check him, unmoved, but still breathing. He feeds the sleeve into his mouth, squeezes a few drops past his lips. His expression is no longer slack in death, but is starting to crease in pain again, growing pink and flushed as the fever returns. When he takes another trip for more water, Aomine’s puked again in his absence, curled on his side in a puddle of watery vomit, diluted bile. Kagami wipes his face, tenderly washing it and feeding him another drink.

It’s strange, having nothing between them anymore. Nothing to stop him from reaching out to him. He doesn’t have to strain and struggle or twist his arms at an awkward angle to try and touch him. His figure isn’t chopped into pieces by bars, lying whole before his eyes. Kagami could embrace him if he wanted. Hold him in his arms as Aomine had wished in his dying breath.

He sits at Aomine’s side and tries to care for him the best he knows how. He seems to be hanging on. The fever is brutal, but it’s far less awful than that horrible scare Aomine had given him earlier, cold and pale as a stone. At least this burning heat and delirium meant Aomine’s body still thought life was worth a shot.

Starting to feel hopeful and less terrified out of his wits, Kagami busies himself trying to clean him up a little. The smell doesn’t hit him as hard anymore, but it doesn’t go away, pungent and nauseating. The look of him is so miserable that Kagami feels a tremendous sense of pity for him, suffering there so helplessly.

Kagami would take him to the river and wash his back and legs if he weren’t so afraid to move him. He doesn’t want to risk snuffing out what’s left of his fragile grasp on life, little more than a flickering candle. On the other hand, he’s also afraid to leave him to go get food and water. What if he comes back and finds he’s gotten worse, or finds that he’s already gone. 

Kagami doesn’t want him to be alone, if he goes.

Aomine wakes after many, many hours. 

After about an hour or two of keeping watch over him, Aomine’s fever had worsened even further, enough that he’d begun moaning aloud and would occasionally toss his head. He'd curl up and clutch his middle, and he'd _cry— _cry like a baby. His whimpers are so heart-wrenchingly pitiful they bring tears to his own eyes. He wishes he could do more, but he has to sit and watch, hold Aomine's hand as he vomits, straining and convulsing for what feels like forever. Aomine's eyes open sometimes but he doesn’t see anything, lost in a blind delirium, not in the present moment. He trembles all over, stomach utterly empty and clenching in terrible pain. Kagami had felt scared and completely helpless as he’d watched him sluggishly writhe and suffer like that, hugging his head in his lap and trying to cool his face. Aomine had eventually gone still again, laying quiet.

And then as suddenly as it struck, the fever broke, and Aomine just slept soundly for a time.

When he wakes, it’s gradual, eyes drifting open only a slit, rolling beneath the lids. They eventually open to about halfway, and his gaze slowly focuses on Kagami, who looks down from above. His face is oddly slack, somehow peaceful.

He blinks up at him slowly. His cracked lips part, his tongue separating audibly from the roof of his mouth. A raspy breath.

“... Am I in heaven?” 

It’s the first thing he says now that he’s lucid again, head resting in his warm lap, looking up at Kagami like he’s some radiant vision, a golden-winged angel. Kagami’s heart jumps for joy. 

“Not yet.”

Aomine’s lip quirks at the corner, eyes drifting shut for a second, but he forces them back open. A hint of the flirty smirk Kagami remembers so well, a whisper, playful and so, so quiet. 

“Gotta’ be,” he breathes, picking up an arm slowly. It shakes and meanders when his meagre energy can’t make it go where he wants. His knuckles brush the side of Kagami’s face. “You’re right here,” he murmurs, eyes crinkling in a smile.

“No more bars.”

He pulls on Kagami’s head, a weak press of his fingertips that coaxes Kagami to lean down to him and bring his face to his, kiss him on the lips.

Kagami presses his mouth to Aomine’s cold lips, slots his nose beside Aomine’s and sinks his face into the curve of his cheek, kisses him tenderly. His mouth tastes like vomit, his breath smells like death, a warm ghost on his face.

When he draws back, Aomine tries to hold him there, but his grip is too weak. His hands hang there like claws, eyes like black holes, face like a skull—  
  
Kagami holds his head in his hands and kisses him on both cold cheeks.

“I found the way out.”

Aomine stares up at him blankly for a time, and then his eyes start to beam and glow. A tiny glint on the water at the bottom of a deep, dark well. “Yeah?” he gets out, a cracked whisper.

“Yeah. Let’s go, lazy bones.”

Aomine remembers hearing the cage door open, but it had felt like a dream to him, too far away, hadn’t thought it was real. He has enough energy to stay awake and talk a little, but he can’t do much more than keep breathing and maintain consciousness. He’s severely dehydrated and he’s in the late stages of starvation, hence his body saying _ fuck it _and giving up trying to digest anything, even water. Kagami has to get him out right away.

He helps sit him up, holding the weight of his head and back with a careful arm as he lifts him, and then holds him when he sways and blacks out completely for a few moments, but he can support himself after a minute and sit up on his own. He’s in really rough shape, a filthy rotten mess, and now that he’s leaned forward, Kagami can see he’s got sores all over him from laying in one position in the cage for so long, from laying in waste.

Aomine can’t stand. Not just because he’s so weak and sick. He’s been cramped up in that cage for so long that his legs have atrophied, wobbling when Kagami tries to help heave him up. They can’t support him, collapsing immediately under his weight over and over until he locks his knees.

“This isn’t working. Just get on my back and lemme’ carry you.”

“No way,” Aomine refuses, a raspy wheeze. His body trembles, but he looks so excited, so glad to be out of there, free to walk around and finally unfold his cramped up body. “Let a guy stretch his legs—”

He’d been locked in there so long he’d probably thought he’d die before he’d get the chance to stand up and walk around ever again. The idea makes Kagami relent.

He holds onto Aomine’s arm and slings it over his shoulders to keep him up, then uses his other arm to hold him around the waist, helping him walk. Aomine’s elbow hooks on the back of his neck, trembling as he hangs on, body struggling to stay upright. He can hardly pick up his feet to take a step.

It takes a long time to get to the river, dragging Aomine along with him. He huddles to Kagami’s side in the blackness, breathing through his mouth and shuffling clumsily over the cave floor.

When they get to the waterside, Kagami sits him on the shore, holding him under the armpits to keep him up. He eases him down in the shallows and lets him bathe, finally washing away the filth caking his body. His legs, the seat of his pants, his back, it clouds the water immediately. When he’s certain Aomine can stay sitting up on his own, he peels his clothes off for him and starts scrubbing them on a rock, washing them out. He sits a ways away and watches Aomine dunk himself in the water so he can wash his back, his hair, his face, rubbing himself clean with his hands.

His lean body is a long naked stretch of gleaming dark skin, clean and soaked, he looks like a completely different person. Kagami’s eyes follow the curve of his back as he sits in the shallows. Sharp hips. Sharp ribs and elbows and knees. The ridges of his back are bony and pronounced, his spine and lower back peppered with painful blisters and sores. A sunken gut. A dark head of hair, soaking wet and haloed in a wet gleaming ring. Beautiful, beautiful dark hair and eyes and skin. Long toes like a monkey— 

Water covering his lap, feet pressed flat to the rock and knees brought up to keep stable, Aomine brings handfuls of water to his face and scrubs it, dousing his hair and combing it with his fingers. In that moment he becomes something else, blends into a faraway memory of what his life was before, a memory of what he would be if they’d met a lifetime ago. He’s only ever known him locked up in a cage like a wild beast, but in that moment Kagami thinks of his carefree summers, before his troubles caught up with him, his happiest moments— 

A naked boy in the river, setting his young heart ablaze.

Kagami can’t take his eyes off him.

He scrubs Aomine’s clothes until the water runs clear when he squeezes them, slings them out on a rock so they won’t float off, then takes off his own and swims out a ways, having gotten filthy himself from taking care of Aomine. He submerges himself briefly and then comes up, shaking water out of his face and pushing his hair back as he wades back to the shallows.

Aomine scoops up water in his hands and splashes it around his armpits and onto his chest, staring around in wonder, taking it all in with new eyes. He keeps murmuring idly that he never knew any of this was here, amazing view— Kagami stares past it all, stares at him, his pitiful sallow face, his weak body. Almost every one of ribs is showing. Kagami’s are too. He’s so much taller than he’d looked, cramped up in that box. He’s as tall as Kagami—

“Fuck, I think I’m in love,” Aomine teases, leaning back on his palms and watching Kagami bathe.

Kagami wades over and stands bare in front of him, one hand on his hip, one smoothing back his hair. Aomine tilts his head back and takes an eyeful, raising his brows. Kagami kicks a foot to splash him, and Aomine just lets a lazy smirk stretch his cheeks.

“Me too,” Kagami shoots back as he plops down in the water next to him. “Now that you smell like a human instead of an ass turned inside-out.”

Aomine smiles, a little laugh huffed through his nose. His eyes glitter like crystal.

“I try.”

Kagami takes his face in his hands and kisses him, because he’s infuriatingly loveable, soft-eyed and sharp-mouthed and so perfect. Aomine kisses back, a contented hum rumbling in his bony chest. He opens his mouth and sucks down Kagami’s tongue, nipping at it with his teeth, and Kagami gets such a thrill of surprise that the rush of excitement goes to his head. He gets a little too zealous in reciprocating, because Aomine’s arms give out behind him and they go down into the water. Kagami picks himself up on all fours, hair hanging in his eyes and drizzling into Aomine’s face.

He sputters and flails, latching onto Kagami’s chest to try to pull himself up, coughing when the surface laps over his face, a gulp of water going down his throat. Kagami pulls him forward when his strength fails him, too weak to pick up his head. Aomine shudders and coughs. Kagami sheepishly sits him up. “You— Fuck,” he wheezes, “You nutcase! Are you tryina’ kill me?”

“Hey, you’re the cannibal here,” he blurts defensively. “Were you trying to swallow my tongue or something?”

Aomine wipes a hand over his face, dragging it down and giving him a narrow-eyed smirk. “Yeah, stick it out, you maniac. See if I won’t bite it off.”

Kagami leans in quick and licks his lower lip and Aomine snaps his teeth as he darts back. A laugh bursts out and he sinks into a kiss with a sigh. They kiss and flounder there in the water until they’re too tired to screw around anymore.

“Man,” Aomine hums, looking up at the ceiling from where Kagami had dragged him to shore. Kagami looks up, sitting on a rock a ways away, stretching his limbs to prepare for the swim up the tunnel.

“So that’s the worst diarrhea I’ve _ ever _had.”

Kagami splashes him.

Aomine laughs and puts a hand up to block. “Look, I’m sorry!” he teases when Kagami comes stomping over and keeps splashing him, just because he can, just because all the times he’d wished Aomine was out of the cage, it was so he could help gather food and explore with him, but he’d never realized how fun it would be to just dick around and play. Besides, he’s sure that if Aomine weren’t so weak right now, he’d have cranked the pest factor up to ten by this time, so he’d better get his fill of picking on him while he has the advantage.

"I tried to hold it!"

“I always knew you were fulla' shit.” Aomine thinks that’s funny. He laughs and laughs until Kagami can’t help but smile too.

He takes Aomine by the arms and starts to tow him in, pull him to his feet. Aomine’s still snickering. “I’m not always. This has never happened before, I swear,” he jokes, and Kagami groans aloud. “If I weren’t at death’s door, I swear I’d get it up for you—”

“I think I liked it better when you were too weak to be this dirty for once.” 

He says it, but it’s a total lie. Just a few hours ago, when Aomine had laid there in his arms, cold and dead, Kagami would have given anything to hear his stupid flirting one more time. Aomine seems to know it too, the ass.

“Hey, I’m an invalid, be nice to me,” Aomine hums, smiling with all his teeth. Kagami just shakes his head and rolls his eyes.

“Get dressed and let’s go.”

"Okay but I can't, so help me."

"Fine, shut up and sit still then."

Aomine gives him one last once over, being sure to play up his disappointment when Kagami pulls his shirt on. He stops and stares at Aomine when he pops his head out the hole, challenging and suspicious. Aomine purses his lips and rakes him up and down again. 

“What.”

“... So it looks like everything really does start to shrink when you’re starving.”

“Oh back off, this water’s freezing.”

They get their wet clothes on and then he hefts Aomine up and wades into the water with him. He doesn’t think Aomine has the energy to make the swim, and he’s not confident about carrying him, but he doesn’t see what their other options are. “Hold onto my back,” he directs, looping Aomine’s arms around his neck and paddling from rock to rock with him. He doesn’t seem as heavy in the water, that’s for sure, but swimming with him on his back is tough.

Aomine tries to kick his legs and stay afloat when Kagami struggles to keep them both up. He starts sinking, clinging onto his shoulders, and Kagami has to tread in place until he’s got him up again.

“Don’t— Don’t try to swim,” Kagami gasps when he makes it to the next rock. “Just hold onto me.”

“I’m too heavy to carry, this isn’t going to work.”

“I can do it,” he cuts off before he can suggest something dumb like leaving him. “Just hold on until I say.”

Kagami readies himself, and then pushes them off of the last rock, swimming as hard as he can through the tugging current of the falls, striking out for the tunnel. Aomine’s dead weight creates a lot of drag. It’s much harder than swimming back here alone, but Kagami manages to keep their heads above the surface.

Aomine is getting dragged down by the current, Kagami can feel it drag and suck at his legs, kicking hard to keep them both up, hit with a burst of adrenaline as the water comes up to his ears, pulling him down. He flails and splashes out with his arms, and manages to kick a foot off the cave wall, giving them a solid push forward and into the tunnel, to another outcropping of rock, dry land— 

No, not dry, the rock is slick and slippery with a thin film of water that mists from the falls, trickling down to join the rest. Kagami clings to it with all his strength, till his scraped up fingers feel like they’ll snap. He hefts Aomine up, sputtering and coughing, spitting up water in his ear. They stay there until Kagami can’t hold on anymore and plunges them back in, kicking and fighting to get into the tunnel.

When they escape the current, Kagami breathes a sigh of relief. “Okay— Okay, now just let yourself float. Hold my shoulders and let me pull you.”

Aomine clings for a time, unwilling to loosen his grip on his raft, but as Kagami swims forward, his underwater frog-kicks keeping the surface calm and smooth, Aomine’s hands are a gentle pressure on his shoulders. He floats above Kagami like a cloud, keeps his head up and lets the rest of him trail behind.

Then it’s a quiet jaunt down the long stretch of dark river tunnels, the only sounds being the rush of the water, the drip of the ceiling, and Kagami’s panting. Aomine’s breath is a cool whisper in his ear as he looks above them and marvels at the arch of the crystal ceiling.

When his feet brush the cave floor, he lets himself rest, muscles straining from the effort. “Almost there now,” he says, voice echoing. Kagami holds Aomine’s wrist and wades with him. Aomine scrambles and slips after him, standing on shaky legs, excitement keeping him on his feet. He can stand, but he can’t walk on his own, needing to lean on Kagami almost completely. They go faster and faster, they’re almost there—

The water sinks to their hips, then their knees. He manages to drag Aomine out onto the shore and they stumble up onto dry land. Kagami hurries him down the passage, he’s going to show him. Any minute now and he and Aomine will be out of this nightmare.

It takes so long that his stomach starts to twist in dread. Maybe— maybe he'd just imagined the whole thing. Maybe he'd gone nuts and dreamed it up. Maybe the stress and the pressure had made him hallucinate and there was no way out after all. Is he going to get Aomine's hopes up to nothing? Is he going to lead them to a dead-end, a blank wall where he'd thought there had been a door?

His heart leaps into his mouth when he sees his feet beneath him on the cave floor, a staticky grey image as the dim reflection of the natural sunbeams creeping in. It was real,_ it was real— _

When they start to see the light, Aomine stops. 

Kagami stands there and listens. He can hear the wind. A distant bird song. Aomine stands there and trembles, gaze unfocused, cheeks pale. Kagami watches him swallow, watches the wide white rings of his eyes, ghosts in the shadow.

He leads him around the corner and Aomine stumbles a few steps and stops again. Just stares at the opening in the wall like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. It can’t possibly be over. Finally, finally over. Face slack and uncomprehending, eerily reminding Kagami of the day they’d met, Aomine stares and stares and doesn’t even squint, burning his eyes on the harsh white light.

Kagami crawls forward, up the pile of dirt and gravel, and starts to dig, scoops his hands into the gravel and throws it down the hill behind him, digs and digs and makes the hole wider, digs it until it’s large enough to fit through if they crawl on their bellies.

He sticks his head out and feels the fresh air on his face like a cold shock, a beautiful smell in his lungs. The hole opens to a small hollow, an overhang of rock that had filled up with dirt and leaves, an animal’s den, perhaps. Tall enough to stand in. 

He shoves and drags himself through, tumbles out and stands. Takes a step towards the outside, marveling at the magnificent vista that comes into view. Even in the shade, he shields his eyes, blindingly bright even though the sky is overcast.

He looks down on the mountainside, the forest. It’s beautiful— beautiful.

Snow-capped peaks line the sky above them, rimming the horizon beyond, and a deep valley is scooped out below, deep verdant green in the shade and brilliant emerald where the sun shines through the clouds and onto the treetops. The river cuts down the mountain, snaking off into the forest. That green landscape seems to go on forever, the sea a distant strip of blue. He thinks he can see the whole world.

Kagami’s captivated by the view, distracted only when he hears Aomine scuffling behind him, lowering to the ground when his legs give out, hands out to catch his fall. “Sorry,” Kagami mutters, ducking back down through the pit to help him crawl up the gravel. He goes first, pulling him behind him, turning to beam at him and his drawn sallow face as he drags him up through the hole. When he gets him out and up on his feet, Aomine stands on his own, keeping back in the shade. 

Kagami steps out towards the edge. Their arms extend to keep holding on. 

He looks back. Seeing Aomine in the light, the sun on his cheek, reflecting off one eye, Kagami watches the sunken shadows that have set into his handsome face, the face he’s only even known twisted with hunger and filth, those shadows melt back. In the sun, his dusky tan glows an orangey bronze.

They tentatively creep to the edge of the cave, Kagami helping Aomine along one step at a time until the grass practically tickles their toes, blown by the gentle breeze. Kagami puts a foot out into the sun and feels a knot in his throat. It’s so warm and sweet he thinks he could fall down and weep with exhaustion, sheer relief.

Aomine stays rooted to the spot, staring out aimlessly, lost in the beauty of nature before them, perhaps unable to process that they’re _ free, they’re free— _

“Where are we gonna’ go.” The words drift out of him like ghosts. He looks up to Kagami, as if coming out of a daze. He looks lost. Kagami’s overcome with it too, a sudden sense of helplessness. He doesn’t know what to do next. Doesn’t know what they do now.

The thing that’s kept him going for so long, a will to survive, the desperate dream that one day he would see his father again, his brother. Home. Does it even exist anymore.

_ Home— Can they even go back home? _

“What if we can’t go back,” he breathes. “If they don’t let us come back, then…” Kagami stares into his desolate face, his eyes looking so young and uncertain that it fills him with emotion. The sunlight slices his face in two, a glowing gold and a dark ghastly grimace in the cave shadow. He sees the glint in his eyes that has always reminded him of a beast stalking through the pines, the beast that has haunted his nightmares for years, an uneasy pit of dread and anxiety sitting in his gut each time he looked at Aomine— He sees that and thinks— 

  
' _I've always been afraid of wolves.'_

He thinks that and feels sucked back under, Aomine's frenzied screams, his desperate bloodshot eyes and Kagami's own raging heart, howling to survive. How far could a person go in order to live, and is that price even worth it— is the shame and guilt even worth living with— After they've peeled so much back, stripped so much bare, how does one continue on as they once were? If they are to make it in life again, escape their pasts, and return to the lives they knew, there’s a sudden sense of wondering if that… if that means saying goodbye. To each other, perhaps even to his own sense of self, some fleeting sense of naivety.

How does he go on in life and reckon with the darkness he's faced. In a way, he'd been trapped underground with his worst enemy, looked his greatest fear in the face and felt that terror strike his heart— _this is where you put monsters— _he's had to face himself, and wrestle with the painful realization that the real monsters don't come out in times of strife. It was always inside him, dormant. That ugliness was always there. And it doesn't go away now that he's crawled away from death's clutches. It's only gone back to sleep. 

It's as if Aomine's asking him the question, _can you live with that—_

It's the same struggle, the same torturous spiral that Aomine had revealed haunts him, follows him like a shadow, an albatross hanging broken from his neck. For a moment the weight of it all feels paralyzing, leaves him feeling utterly desolate.

But now— now he's on the outside. And Kagami's seeing things clearly for what feels like the first time in forever. Perhaps the _very_ first time. Those fears seem so far away now. He's already far, far beyond their reach.

“I’m going home to clear my name,” Kagami says. Hasn’t let himself think about those plans until now. But he’s sure, sure if his father sees his face on the doorstep, if he sees his son is alive, he’ll take him back in. Won’t let him be sent away again. And when Kagami’s home, he can help Aomine, protect him and his family and see that they’re left alone and not bothered for money ever again— 

“What if you can’t. You said they won’t take you back.” 

“They will.”

“Can… Can we even make it out there,” Aomine whispers. He sounds scared of what comes next. Of what life on the outside world means. So resigned to die in there that he hadn’t thought of what to do if he had to pick up and keep on living. Hasn't thought of what he'd do if he got another chance, hasn't thought of how he'd carry on if fate let him live, what he'd do if he had to face himself. Now that he's seen how dark he can get, how does he make any kind of life for himself, how does he sleep at night? How does he walk with his friends and loved ones and not feel like a wolf among sheep—

How, how does he go home—

If the door is closed to them, if their villages and friends and families, if their lives won’t take them back as they were, if their crimes will follow them still, what do they do then? Living out in the world alone, starting over completely, it sounds lonely. Frightening. And he’s reaching out with some scared plea, do they even have each other to rely on, now that this is over— is this where they go their separate ways?

“Kagami,” he croaks. “I…”

“Then we’ll run away,” Kagami says, puts his hand to Aomine’s on top of his shoulder, puts his arm around his back. _ We’ll run away together— _

“Run away.”

“Yeah, run away and rescue Satsuki,” Kagami says, seeing that same skepticism, but the hesitant trust. “And build a cabin in the woods.”

“And how the fuck are you gonna’ do that?”

“You’re gonna’ show me. You promised to teach me how to rough it, remember?” Aomine looks at him for a long time. 

_ How do I live— How do I live with the things I’ve done. How do I live with this stain on my life— _

Kagami steps out onto the grass, squints up at the sky, feels almost alarmingly free, no more walls, no more cramped tunnels. He wants to run and leap, roll on the ground, sprint down the mountainside, he can go anywhere, look at the earth spread before them. He looks back at Aomine.

_ Live for me. _

_ If you can’t live for yourself just yet, then live for me. Until you remember how. _

After all, wolves are only dogs.

Aomine finally smiles. "Sure Kagami."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and off they go in the world, to live like wild forest boys and rescue satsuki and auntie.
> 
> Okay, I haven’t written something that could make my own self cry in a while, but this last chapter, the part where Kagami starts to cry over his body always gets me choked up. Sorry for the dramatics— 
> 
> Thanks for reading, guys, hope to see you in my future works.


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